Pilgrims –
The winter solstice is a traditional time for reflection, and as it happens, roughly the first anniversary of “Intermittent Signal.” I started this newsletter to distribute my work across media and disciplines, that is, as an effort to publicize. I originally had in mind a set of links, with brief captions, to be put out “intermittently,” when I had work to share.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, something different has emerged. A good reader suggested that a book might be written as “a friendly letter to the community you’re longing for, as you do so well in your newsletter.” Whether or not he’s right about the book, he’s right about “Intermittent Signal.” I had not quite noticed that this newsletter had become, well, a letter to an audience that I’m struggling to build, an appreciative community. That would appreciate me. OK, that cut a bit.
“Songs about me, and who I am” (Trace Adkins on his country music) notwithstanding, it is difficult to know how intimate to be here. I do much of my thinking through email, directed to specific individuals, addressed accordingly. Today, members of my family receive “Intermittent Signal,” as do friends of various degrees, professional acquaintances, and strangers. And we live in an age of oversharing. I’ve no desire to use this letter as a real time report on my experience, that is, as so many use social media.
On the other hand and just as obviously, I do not want to be entirely private, either. And art arises from (not exactly individual) experience, no? Indeed, all thought bespeaks the thinker, inevitably located. Even physics – as Niels Bohr famously had it, science is not about nature, but what we can say about nature. So, I am trying to walk a line, as one must.
To be honest, I do not have much to show for the last month or so, nothing new and “finished” to share. (“To be honest,” as the kids say, implying who knows what subtle deceptions infect their usual speech?) Of course, I blame family, and my day job. But it is the solstice, and I started this project a year ago, and I’m told that audiences need content, so it seemed wrong to let the moment pass without writing y’all.
Besides, I have been thinking seasonal thoughts. I’m struggling with a photo essay that revisits surrealism, with its “manifestos” that I am coming to think really silly. A hundred years on, it seems that what surrealism – and I have in mind more painting than writing – achieved was not a new way to understand political and social life, indeed artistic and moral life, as decreed by a “manifesto.” Nor did surrealism become more real by incorporating dreams in some sense that transcended morality (a sloppy reading of Freud). Instead, surrealism is literally sur, on, meta our “reality,” and so is able to foreground not the items depicted, often banal and coolly presented, but instead the experience of strangeness, of viewing our lives as curious.
Maybe I read that Kierkegaard said that the central mystery of Christianity was not the resurrection, life after death, but the incarnation, infinite God made finite man. Not Easter but Christmas. I think the achievement of images we recognize as “surreal” is to occasion the feeling that right here, right now, is utterly strange. Not strange because it is different, but strange in itself. We are not in the moment, we are aware that the moment is, itself, wondrous, a kind of miracle. Something rather than nothing. (Where are we when we think such thoughts?)
Something odd, off, is usually required to awaken this sensibility. In Magritte, it is often weird light, as in the photo above. Delvaux images adorn Louvain, where I spent a year, and I used his work as frontispieces for the parts of City of Gold: An Apology for Global Capitalism in a Time of Discontent. The unself-conscious (sleeping? drugged? angelic? alien?) nudity of Delvaux’s marmoreal figures and the Victorian characters moving through the unreal yet familiar settings, ruins, forests, seductive, spooky, and just out of reach. See, for example, Homage a Jules Verne. And this sensation suggests, or I hoped it would suggest, just how strange our world is, an international polity built upon money, frozen desire (like the nudes), yet itself insubstantial. Something where there was nothing. A politics not of manifestos, or even mystery in the sense of conspiracy, but collective wonder through which we usually sleep, sometimes awakening with a start.
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Which brings me to crypto, obviously. Just this past month, and a bit inside baseball:
One fine day FTX implodes, in what looks pretty much like a classic bank run. Jay Clayton, former head of SEC, gets on some morning finance show, the sort of thing that spools on and on before the markets open. I almost never watch such things, but I’ve just gotten off a redeye, on which I had acquired pretty much the last seat, jammed against a window, barricaded by a nice sleeping couple, too warmly dressed, slowly dehydrating. I make it to Detroit, stiff and desiccated, and limp to the lounge. I’m trying to reboot, orange juice coffee breakfast bites, balancing deep weariness, thirst, hunger, sleepiness, and an increasingly dicey stomach, waiting for the hop to Buffalo, and Clayton is nattering on and on and on. Even through my fog I realize he’s giving quite the elegant little tutorial in banking regulation. Liquidity transformation, maturity transformation, all have risks, and so we, in the financial community, have developed responses. Leverage limits, capital requirements, soundness requirements, etc., and even the lender of last resort function. Despite my parlous state, I can tell Clayton’s smooth, and there’s a masochistic pleasure in this little hellish moment, a sort of admiration, even love, for my tormentor. I think Orwell wrote about this. For cinematographic purposes, I should have been hung over, with my clothes reeking of smoke, but it wasn’t quite that bad. Just bad.
Anyway, through the fog: what gave me pause is that the “finance” at issue is crypto. In my delirium, I heard Clayton say “lend freely, against really good tulips, but at a penalty rate.” Put differently, I’m suspicious of the extent to which one can prudently regulate a financial institution founded on an unanchored asset. One could imagine a bank run that did not impair faith in the asset. That wasn’t this, but traditional banking crises do not usually undercut faith in the currency in which the institution’s assets and liabilities are denominated. And I suppose a LOLR could, in principle, guarantee losses with sound currency, in effect pegging the asset to the fiat currency, neatly reversing the dreams of crypto enthusiasts . . . On the other side of the ledger, the LOLR function assumes that the lending is done in something “sound,” i.e., not Reichsmarks or Confederate dollars or, one must think, another unanchored cryptocurrency . . .
In airworld, it is difficult to find the earth.
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From a few years ago, before I started “Intermittent Signal,” but very much on point:
On a more celestial note, the other day I was splitting and moving wood and thought I was hearing things, not just ringing in my ears but a very faint tinkling cooing sound coming from everywhere and nowhere. I’d been alone at altitude for a while, and as the song goes, “I hear voices all the time.” I felt well, however, and looked about – when you are alone in the cold and hearing things, almost anything might be a source of faint noises. Nada. Remembering that something similar had happened to me once before, I looked up. From over 3300 m on a clear day, there’s just not much air above, and the dark blue hints of space, the sky no longer sheltering. Still nothing. My eyes used to be fantastic, but that was then. Even so, I’m pretty sure I’ve got some more miles on this engine, so I wasn’t actually getting nervous, but thoughts come unbidden, best to just let them on through, as I stood there swaying, as one does when looking straight up into a bottomless sky.
All of a sudden, white flecks. One of the lower flocks had wheeled, and for perhaps three seconds their wings caught the sun. And then the cranes disappeared, to reappear later, slightly farther south. Use a good screen.
The cranes migrated all day, usually too high for me to see, even with binoculars. On another occasion I watched a flock start high, circling, perhaps seeking wind, until they disappeared from sight, as if they’d spiraled up into space. And that night, when I went out for the last armful of stove wood, it was clear and dead still without a moon, the Milky Way spilling, and I could hear the birds migrating by starlight, showering me and the land all ‘round with elven laughter. Magic.
I like this picture quite a lot, think it’s one of the best I’ve ever taken, even though it’s obviously bad. The image’s very lack of definition, a framed blur, suggests the magic, birds like a fuzzy image of a galaxy. The viewer is invited in, to “read” and to speculate, to wonder. Most photographs present their subjects, like the pictures of the mule deer buck that I happened to take yesterday on the way home from skiing with the prodigal, and use here by way of example. His little group didn’t follow him across the road, and so he sort of grunted, and then he went back, while I stood there in the road, photographing. A magnificent animal, a special moment, but a simple picture.
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More recently, a few weeks ago, from a McDonald’s station parking lot, Russell, KS, as the tallgrass gives way to the high plains, home of Bob Dole and Arlen Spector. How’s that for nature, culture, to say nothing of color especially color and (emergent) form? Make of it what you will, and can, or not.
“James’s critical genius comes out most tellingly in his mastery over, his baffling escape from, Ideas; a mastery and an escape which are perhaps the last test of a superior intelligence. He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.” T.S. Eliot in appreciation of Henry James.
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If I may end as I began, on an existential note: the new year, and its ambitions, desires to be somebody, will be upon us soon enough. For now, may you keep your feasts, and may those of you in the North enjoy the cold and dark as I do. Draw your loved ones near, and maybe a few strangers, too. Wondrous.
— David A. Westbrook