Life of a Human Piledriver

“Information-based society.” oh, man, how many times have we heard about this canned notion already? But that is the word on the street. serious knowledge. the Real Deal. my fortune cookie even said so the after an evening of Szechuan Tofu. On a little scrap of ribbon paper it read: "Gazpacho is tomato based; a rue, flour based. You are Information based." The 14th Patriarch couldn't have said it better.

The Internet is certainly one key ingredient in this tepid and endless information soup. And papers of all kinds, another. I wonder too if even the T.M.I. or “Too-Much-Information” heard from housemates concerning their certain personal details may become an informational hair on the back of a particularly distracted camel overburdened with Knowing. But still, the world wideness of the web accounts for a bulk lot of it, the camel's share. Stuck in that web, you might flounder and perish. and its only Tuesday! you still have a whole week of whatever you are supposed to get through.


…

Long before the advent of the Internet and its virtual virtues, I was raised in a household that admired not only information, but the extensive storing of information -hardcopy- and of too much of it. If you file these things Dewey-decimal like, it’s called a library. If you stack the cut-out articles and coupons from magazines, newspapers and everything else in piles and unlabelled boxes that form corridors of passage through a room, that is a fire hazard. and moreso, it is PackRat-ism.

Like a baby mouse, I was reared in a capacious nest of shredded paper. and it is a tendency I have to fight still now that I roam the meadow by myself. It is piles (usually tidy) that my housemate, C., worries might fall over in the middle of the night in my room…


But my pile issues are so very different from some people in town, who have embraced two Great American Traditions and rolled them into one in a PB to the J sandwich manner. The venerable practices of:
Hoarding & Driving
-- and doing them simultaneously.

I refer to this lifestyle as “piledriving” so only logically these folks are Piledrivers. One piledriver I know of works at the Food Co-op. He drives Suburban that looks like it was once shiny copper, but is now rained-stained into a cupric green patina. It is stuffed almost exclusively with old newspapers. All accept the driver’s seat. if just barely.

I don’t know how he drives it, because if you look into the driver’s side window, there is literally no space to move your elbows. Maybe he only drives in straight lines. Maybe he just shifts his weight left or right while the rig is rolling forward. I’m not sure.

The other one I know lives two houses down from me. Not surprisingly, this fellow also drives an old Chevy Suburban (if you are going to haul, you HAUL, baby).

The photo is a night shot, and not so good, so I hope the sense conveys (unlike the other guy, I’m a little afraid of this piledriver, so I opt to have the cover of darkness). He carries a wider range of things in his snail shell, including a lot of old fast food wrappers, books, and assorted memorabilia (note St. Mickey, Patron Saint of Adorable Overconsumption, on the dash).

…

There are books probing the psychology of this kind of behavior. you might in fact find it in one of these Suburbans if you look hard. but even if there were, would you read it? One thing that is common among hoarding is that what one holds onto is largely if ever put to use. If you are really good at this kind of thing, maybe congratulations, they call you “ a collector.”

There is that thing about Letting Go. but I have a hard time of it.

The other day my computer crashed, and in that moment, all of my outbox from January of this year to now soundlessly vanished. it is nowhere to be found. I told D. about this misfortune, and she mused, that, well, “how could you ever say you ever really gave those messages and letters to the people you sent them off to if you still hold onto them?” Trust the seminarian to drop the straight truth on you like it was the time of day. After all, I don’t have the paper letters I sent anyone, so, yes, really why should I have the bytes?

I understand this, intellectually. but my mouse-mind is small. native to its ways. and reluctant to lose hold of the warm and secure bedding these habitual scraps have all become.

Sunday Paper

This weekend had its fair share of interesting things, things that could make great extended blog-fodder. This included:

-The Drag Show at Ringside my Japanese friends wanted to go to, and were equal parts agog and pleased by,

-The great benefit concert put on for the Palestinian town of Tuwani,

-The birthday potluck that on arriving I came to discover was Incredible Hulk themed, but where everyone suddenly and unexpectedly pulled out instruments. This, only to find that three banjos, three guitars, three fiddles, a harmonica and bathtub bass later, that I was square dancing.


...
But, none of these appealed to my larger bloggish affections. For none of them made me feel quite as good as my discovery of a brand new art supply shop - in downtown Durham- that carries good paper.

Although this web-log is called the Paper Boat, the only thing I talk about less than boats is probably paper. One reason for this might be that I’ve been disappointed in universe of paper offering around here. There is a good shop in Raleigh, I hear, but that’s a trek. and the shops in Durham and Chapel Hill have all consistently disappointed. Mind you-me, I know absolutely nothing about paper as a technical art or craft. I just know what I like, and what I think inked blocks will print well on.

And so, I was glad to be the first customer of Main Street Art supply.
The Very First.
I wanted it for projects this weekend, and Christa and Sam went through their piles of inventory, opening all the shipment boxes hither-thither. Among all their wares were in fact many stacks of fine paper. My fingers browsed. Fingers feel lighter when they hold things like paper. They also make sounds that find no articulation or even existence otherwise except upon the moment the shifting of hands move along the wide, thin blankets of possibility that paper is.



Poets write on paper. But how often to they write about it?
The range of descriptors that sommeliers use for wine I would imagine could apply equally to the world of paper. Christa knew her stock, and together we oo-ed over the different kinds and their qualities of heft, hue, and transparency.



Of paper, more than plenty of it was worth buying for use in some experiments of ink and attention. I left with the following. None disappointed today when Ink kissed Surface…

Frankfurt Cream
Arches Rives (125g/sq.meter)
Somerset Book Softwhite
Johannot
Hosho

Blood may be thicker than water,
but Paper, it is thinner than all the spaces Inbetween.

Classical Breathing

I usually don’t listen to much classical music. but yesterday morning was that kind of day. it was Warm in this second week of December. you could walk barefoot onto a porch and feel just mighty fine as you please.

some kind of string orchestra was playing away when something I never had noticed came sliding out of the radio into my mind’s ear. Maybe I heard something completely different, but I swear that this what I heard: the sound of the player breathing during the viola solo.

Every several seconds, the curved and crisp sound of a quick inhalation
(//h-h-h)
Quiet. It was not unlike to the sound of a persons fingers sliding along the metal strings of an acoutic guitar. but not that sound at all. It was was the sound of air. these short stacatto bursts of smooth and transparent breaths. with the volume cranked so high, it sounded like wind in the kitchen.

Viola players, am I wrong?
If I am, maybe don’t tell me.

Iris Chang & The Other

MEMORY & IMAGINATION(a)

I was flipping through the last pages of The Economist the other day and saw a face I thought I recognized, or remembered from somewhere. And I did, from the back of a book cover. It was Iris Chang, and the article said she had died. on November 9th, at age 36.



It is now six years to the week when I finished reading her book “the Rape of Nanking.” The book is one of few to fully chronicle the killing and pillaging of the citizens of the city of Nanking, China, by the Japanese army in four months of 1937-38. It is asserted that 80,000-380,000 people were killed (give or take History’s astounding 'margins of error'). However, it is the nature of the brutality with which this was carried out that no one in China has ever forgiven Japan for; much of Japan refuses to acknowledge that in fact it ever happened.

How is it that such divergent truths exist. The history texts are literally written differently in these different countries. But I tend to think that what the books say isn’t simply a cause, as much as it is a symptom. Sociologist Evitar Zerubavel writes, “Far from being a strictly spontaneous act, remembering is governed by social norms of remembrance that tells us what we should remember, and what we should essentially forget.”

History seems to be fundamentally the embodiement Collective Memory.
Chang wanted her work to be a medicine for these symptoms of collective amnesia.
...

It was shock and dismay to read that this amazing author had died not only so young, but apparently by her own hand. The Economist reports that she had presently been working on a book about the Bataan Death March, and that in researching for it “the stories had been affecting her,” in a way that significantly contributed to her recent and severe depression. As speculative - and perhaps sensationalistic- as that sounds, I can’t see how it wouldn’t be true. How could anyone delve so deeply into atrocity and not have rattled the middle of the middle of their bones.

I remember writing a paper in college about massacres during the Chinese civil war in the 1920’s. I remember that during that time I couldn’t even read the newspaper at the kitchen table without starting to cry. It was ridiculous. Obviously that shallow spring puddle of a term paper doesn't compare to the ocean you would have to dive into, and swim in for years, in devoting your life to writing books on these subjects.

How is it that even in never experiencing these kinds of events, that these secondary experiences so filtered can still leave such thick and purple marks on us we aren't fully able to handle them? It has something to do with empathy, and empathy's connection to and dependence on imagination. Maybe it is that we are humans, maybe we have brains that are large enough to be too large. Our ability to imagine “the unimaginable” is beyond vast. This much is clear.

IMAGE & IMAGINATION(b)

Of course, one critical aspect to both memory and imagination in the last 150 years of world life finds its home in the reality of the photographic image. Not only is there facsimile of a true and actual moment in a photo, but there is a signifier like a pointing finger that tells us to imagine what is possible in reality. Such photos have mattered in the understanding and memory of the Rape of Nanking, as with other wars & genocides.

It is because of this certain heavy talent for Memory, Imagination, and photographic documentation, that some facts about our ways of being feel so cruelly absurd. I was lucky to see the film “The Fourth World War” the other day in Chapel Hill, on T.'s invitation. One scene illustrated the connection of the anti-IMF protest in Argentina with the general anti-government movements related to the years of the “Dirty War,” --that time in the 70’s when tens of thousands were “disappeared” in that (and many other) South American country.

The mothers of the disappeared still come to the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. They march, They sit. They bang pots, and they hold up the photos of their children the government disappeared. Photos as the document of memory; as the symbol of possibility that is now lost possibility. but maybe never completely.



In the film, a mother at the microphone speaks to the crowd, stating in a cracking voice that she is "the Other," not unlike the hundreds of Other people the government deems as such, and so abuse. There is no Other to her, that is not also herself. In this way she refuses to let the Other exist, and the notion to find legitimacy. And how could the all those soldiers in the military so easily Other those young men and women, just their same age, that they kidnapped and killed over those years. Or the Japanese soldiers do what they did in Nanking.

Isn’t that also the Imagination? I am afraid of this thought. But as much as Imagination lets us empathize with people and events far or past, it seems that it also has a remarkable capacity that lets us imagine that the very people in front of us aren't people anything in the way we are people. How else could human life simultaneously mean so much and damn little to us, at every very same moment? It seems too easy.
...

Put another way...

Recently photos of Navy SEALS with Iraqis homes they had raided, were found on the web, at a site called www.smugmug.com. As CNN reports:

“One man lies on his back with a boot on his chest. A mug shot shows a man with an automatic weapon pointed at his head and a gloved thumb jabbed into his throat…What appears to be blood drips from the heads of some. A family huddles in a room in one photo. Other pictures show debris and upturned furniture…The woman who posted them told the AP they were on the camera her husband brought back from Iraq…”

And what is it about the nature of our Imagination's ability to Other that allows the wife of the soldier to say, with absolutely no apparent trace of irony, that:

“She was upset that a reporter was able to view the album, which includes family snapshots.”

Isn't this also an instance of Imagination's power? The soldier and his wife are documenting. They creating the collective memory with plenty of Imagination(b) and hardly none of Imagination(a). Her family snapshots seamlessly together with those of an Iraqi family whose home has been raided and are sitting on the floor bound, on smugmug.com. And somehow she and we can - and regularly do - imagine there is nothing too strange about this, because somehow these families aren't even similar in whatever fundamental ways that would and could matter. Whatever Imagination does and is, it is a moral capacity.

How How is one to understand this? Is there anything here capable of understanding? Is this possibly anything similar to the nature of the questions Iris Chang faced in doing her work, multiplied by powers of ten? I don't know if the terrible power of imagination let her Other herself to the point that she could do what she did to herself. But the relevatory and positive capacities of her imagination are also now gone, as are all the future memories that she was to have. and I can't see how this isn't a tragic loss.

I know I am in equal parts reckless with memory, imagination, and the photographic image - and this post is maybe only evidence to that point. But this is avoidable. It has to be. to believe it is possible to treat Memory, Imagination, and the Image in a way that makes how we now create Others more and more unteneble. That that place does have a beginning.