1.
As if the grey in their hair was leaking
Through the blood barriers,
The firing wetted, the hissing all too familiar,
Like the smell in the basement,
The family smell that only strangers smell.
He wrote those lines last night while sitting at the kitchen table waiting for his mother and stepfather to arrive, and while writing them a phrase from a Kate & Anna McGarrigle song involuntarily repeated in his head: Fortune's blind as blind as you, my dear / What a pity, oh foolish you.
His brain has been doing this more than usual. He is getting old, he thinks, his mind wanders, it hears something or smells something and worries at it, shakes and twists it and pulls at it, touches it repeatedly, struggles with it.
Fortune's blind as blind as you, my dear / What a pity, oh foolish you
He, or rather it, his head-brain-mind, has also been fixated since Tuesday or so on the word struggle, perhaps because of his lack of work—he hasn’t had any since December—which he thinks might also be an age issue or maybe an AI issue or possibly both. He worries that his clients are assigning jobs to other people because they are younger or feeding them into bots because they are smarter, and for these reasons his head-brain-mind keeps earworming scraps of songs from his childhood and struggling with words like struggle and phrases like the struggle for existence, the constant struggle, signs of a struggle, my struggle, our struggle. He has turned these phrases over so many times in his head-brain-mind—and in his soul—that they have become meaningless, hollow, ridiculous.
Kate & Anna McGarrigle? Where did that come from? He hasn’t thought or heard of them for years.
Fortune's blind as blind as you, my dear / What a pity, oh foolish you.
It is 9:45 in the morning. His stepfather is upstairs, sleeping or doing soduko puzzles on his phone. His mother has been cooking in the kitchen since five am because of the long flight across a dozen time zones and “probably for other reasons too”, she said, without explaining what those other reasons might be. He didn’t ask, they’ve barely spoken, except to talk about his work and lack thereof and his nephew and what his sister is doing, and the weather back home and the weather here, it has been raining all morning and for three straight weeks before—it is the middle of March—and now, just now, the sun has cracked through the clouds and it is raining on their side of the street and sunny on the other. “Something you don’t see every day”, he said to his mother a few minutes ago, as they left the apartment. But his mother didn’t hear him or didn’t understand what he meant. They are walking arm and arm now down the terre-plein of the boulevard, under a new black umbrella. This is when he realizes that his mother is wearing the same uniform—black puffer jacket, black leggings, black boots—as the sex workers that they pass. He hopes his mother doesn’t notice, that the umbrella and the jetlag and the newness of her surroundings will keep her disorientated. It’s a strange thing to hope for, he thinks, as they cross the street to the sidewalk. Your elderly mother’s disorientation. Her bewilderment.
Trailing behind with the dog is his husband, no doubt thinking what a great scene this will make, and how to frame it. Perhaps he is filming it already (he does not turn around to see). It is sunny, it is rainy. The sky is cracked with streaks of orange and yellow light, migraine bright because of the blackness. He walks faster. His mother struggles to keep pace. They pass a restaurant with a line of customers out the door. His mother slows and stops to examine the streaked window, the couples and families seated inside, the crowd at the counter. Dirty, she thinks. They move on, past a woman squatting on the sidewalk next to buckets of marsh grass and duck eggs. The woman says something to them in a dialect his mother does not understand. Next to her, a woman sells sticks and bottles of sauce out of a shopping trolley dolly and a man turns blackening ears of corn on a grill over hot coals in a halved oil drum. Another roasts chestnuts in a smaller drum. Both blow on their fingertips to cool them. Another sells candied peanuts. Another sells bouquets of herbs. A dozen argue in a circle in front of a trade union building. Others sit on benches under the elms drinking beer. Younger ones sit on the same benches smoking weed. Some feed pigeons. Some suck on vapes. Six flash packs of cigarettes, repeating the incantation—“marlboromarlboromarlboro”. Four wait to use a public toilet. Dozens pour up and down the stairs to and from the underground. A blind one, his eyes clouded white, sells laminated fortunes out of a box.
marlboromarlboromarlboromarlboromarlboromarlboromarlboromarlboromarlboro
A train snakes past underfoot, the walls of the supermarket shudder. Certain of these experiences bypass reason and drill directly into his nervous system. Cigarettes, vapes, weed, chestnuts, corn, piss, peanuts, but the sounds more than the smells: his primitive brain, the little lizard clump at the stump, has no truck with madeleines, only waves of activity, tables set and cleared, old songs, men arguing, laughter bouncing off walls, dishes and glasses clinking together, coffee cups and spoons and saucers clattering on the zinc bars. It hears, it reacts. The baffling in his ears flaps, air shudders through the inner vortices. Something crackles inside. The strain becomes the closest approximation to a pattern of thought. His nerves coruscate like the sun-brightened sky. The steps to the station are slippery. The dog strains at the leash, desperate to be first. The platform is empty. The car is full. The apparition of these faces in the crowd: a few wear masks. Are they the cautious ones, the son-in-law asks, or the already sick? The car moves, the earth tilts, spins, and rolls.
Fortune's blind as blind as you, my dear
What a pity, oh foolish you
In a train once, something similar, black rain out one side, sunshine out the other. He was writing a letter to his mother when the train passed a village, a boy and a girl at the side of the tracks, holding hands and laughing, and he stayed with them, part of him at least, he stayed with that boy and girl and with his mother, in that train and in that little lost village in the Bavarian mountains.
As a boy too he had moments like this: listening to the radio with one ear—the sound of the big time—and the railroad tracks with the other, the trains rumbling past, fading into the distance, leaving him behind with the tin-box music and the faraway voices and the lonely sound of the unused cars shunted from the main line to a siding or from one line of rails to another. The sound of his smallness. His ridiculousness.
2.
Photic seizures are keyed to an aural output and triggered by flickering light. Sunlight streaming through a row of trees along train tracks. Sunlight dancing on water. Tika torches. Streetlamps, headlights. A row of lights in a long tunnel.
Shutter speed is a function of frame rate and shutter angle. Film exposed for about 1/50th second at a standard 24 frame/s produces 72 pulses of light per second, well above the flicker fusion threshold for most people most of the time. Most of the time: fatigue is a factor, as is the brightness of the light and the area of the retina being used to observe it. In the projection space itself, the shutter interrupts the light two or three times every frame. In video, “normal” is 1/60th—the time it takes to scan one video field in the NTSC standard. Slower speeds are possible, but the picture becomes brighter, the action jumpy, stroboscopic: moving water strobes on film, it does not blur. The sound, then, can be wind in the trees or ears cupping the sea: in, out, in, out. Whoosh. Whoosh. Or the trumpet or the flute or the blast of the shofar.
Electricity, metal, upholstery. Sound of pressure and release, like the game he and his sister played in the backseat of his mother’s car: fingertips in his ears—plugged, unplugged, plugged, unplugged. Whoosh. Whoosh. The wave and particle of the blood in his veins. His heart.
Crack the hood now and take a good look at this beauty. There are three hundred and fifty-seven olfactive genes in his DNA. Yours too, but the similarity stops there. You will agree on certain things, the forty-five molecules of the olfactory alphabet—industrial pollution, for example, a dozen molecules. The three hundred odours in a mandarin orange. The eight hundred in a cup of coffee. What cabbage is, ethyl isobutrate with a purling note of acetylpurazine—a mix of stale cake, melon and dry sausage. Phenol: bitume, tar, and hospital corridors. But stick a swatch of nonanal (Aldehyde C-9) under our noses and Proust takes over, a gust of conflicting associative data is thrown into the air, physiological and psychological correlates, remembrances, responses. The seaside, you say. A cucumber, he might reply. Or dust. Something warm. A ripe avocado. Asparagus. Rooisbos tea. A hot towel. And so on, incommensurability incarnate. Different commercial processes produce aldehydes by the hydroformylation of 1-octene, and others oligomerize ethylene to 1-octene. He prefers the one developed by Shell Oil, as it is the fastest acting, quick to dissipate.
Remembering his first andouillette, in a bistro in Chartres, after a long session in the cathedral with an American convert to Catholicism who walked them through the stained-glass storybook. It smelled like shit but it tasted good. Washed down with a bottle of cold Cheverny. In a dining room filled with Gitane smoke, with a TV up in the corner next to the bar, on which Mickey Mouse and then Winnie the Pooh moved around with the sound off.
Leaving me this way is hardly fair Must I go seek a fortune too Or must I wait till folly finds it's own way home To me and foolish you
3.
For investigating selective attention in the visual domain, two very different images are presented to the left and right eyes—one image for each—using a View-Master outfitted with orthoptic stereogram cards.
During the war they used the stereoscopes that Allied photo interpreters used to analyse images shot from aerial photo reconnaissance platforms; today they use a modified Pan-Pet Okinawa Viewer on the road and the WHAM-O Magic Eye random-dot auto-stereogram helmet in the lab. Subjects are asked to pay attention to either, or both (divided attention condition) images, and are later required to describe how their visual content differs. Or they are asked to “shadow” the attended image by simultaneously describing out loud its content. This needs to be incorporated into any making.
With the head-mounted WHAM-O unit, a see-through image is imposed upon the real-world view, creating “augmented reality.” The images are bounced through partially reflective mirrors and the real-world view is seen through the mirrors' reflective surfaces. The helmet-mask is partially based on Wheatstone’s kaleidoscope photometer, which somehow (check the files) renders the vibrations of a sounding body visible to the eyes. The mirrors are mounted on what is essentially the works of a watch; they revolve at a high velocity or they swing like a pendulum. The helmet is coupled with a head-tracking device that allows the subject to “look around” the virtual world. You move the head; you don’t need a separate controller. Doing the uploads fast enough is a problem—too slow and the subject vomits. Cumbersome tons of computer image processing are required, but it’s getting better, lighter, more manageable, and with six-axis position sensing (direction and position) the subject can move around, albeit on a short leash.
We’re getting there, he thinks, as the door slides open and they step out. Plugged, unplugged. Car, crowd, car, crowd. Petals on a wet, black bough.
marlboromarlboromarlboromarlboromarlboromarlboromarlboromarlboro
3.
The cigarette sellers are Afghanis. Two years ago, after a violent turf war—knives, sticks, fists, rocks—they replaced the North Africans who used to run the corner. The Kabulians now run the operation everywhere in the country. They are the new Marlboro Men. Elsewhere it might be run by Armenians, Germans, Poles, Ukrainians. Last week illegal cigarette factories were closed in Belgium, Spain and Ireland. Tobacco shops in Australia were lit on fire.
That’s what the papers say.
“No fissures,” Proust wrote. “No geological faults, but at least those veins, those streaks of colour which in certain rocks, in certain marbles, point to differences of origin, age, and formation.” Compare this to the Theravada dhamma set in stone on the grounds of the Kuthodaw pagoda in Mandalay, two thousand pages of carved marble five feet high and three feet wide, each with its own roof. The world’s largest book, a million chiselled lines.
“Precision,” his mother always said. “Precision above all else. Restraint until thought silently matures itself. Hold your tongue till enough meaning lies behind to set it wagging.”
The illusion of depth. Separate processes without a common mechanism. The first question is how to link this to working memory, but finding the sources of the signals, isolating and analysing the effects of those signals on the tuning properties of sensory neurons, is even trickier. Two things at once? Walk and chew gum at the same time? Bring it on. We can do a billion splits. A fly can do a billion splits, brain the size of a poppy seed. A billion simultaneously possible objects, a billion trains of thought, all in a row, creaking and clanking over the underpass, chuffing to a stop in the rail yard.
We take possession of a mind in clear and vivid form and turn it into a juggling monkey brain. The trick is to squeeze a bit, withdraw some of the objects, disembark, descend. You have to drop some balls to effectively handle the others. Remember Gerry Ford, stumbling off the plane? They used to make him rub his bald head with one hand and tap on his fat gut with the other. Laughed till they fell off their chairs. Walk and chew gum at the same time? Hell, he had to close his eyes to pee.
Forget the pyramids, those are constructions outside and beyond our understanding, massive architectural undertakings requiring not just imagination and genius but slaves and whips and chains and thousands of years of tyrannical rule. The cathedrals, however, those great gothic-grown flowers, were built by people like you and me, in times like these. Anonymous craftsmen and tradespeople, free men faithfully fulfilling tasks handed down from master to disciple across generations.
Fuck AI. No more cave drawings, no more symbols, no more contemplative life. Disney was a mistake—a disaster—even if Flowers and Trees was the first shot with a three-strip beam-splitter; even if Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is the most popular sequence of all time; even if a billion people have seen it on the big screen; even if they relaunch it like a reoccurring tidal wave of pus and plague every five years and will continue to do so until the end of time; even if they have duplicated every frame in cellulose triacetate and stashed them six hundred feet under Kansas in a nuclear bomb-proof abandoned salt mine.
Our struggle. Our Chartres. This is what he is thinking as he enters the kitchen and smells what his mother is making.
His stepfather waves. Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh are off the leash and starring in slasher movies. It’s raining on both sides of the street. The Afghanis are still on the corner. Part of him is there too, struggling to survive and find its way home.
Reading you is always a rich and rewarding experience, profound and entertaining. This piece is no exception. I've read it twice now and just might return again...
“Precision,” his mother always said. “Precision above all else. Restraint until thought silently matures itself. Hold your tongue till enough meaning lies behind to set it wagging.” That was my favourite part. Mind you I did go back to try to find the line about smell..."the smell only strangers smell" or something like that..I couldn't find it again. It made me think: "Oh would some power the giftie gie us to smell ourselves as others breathe us."