hi

hi!

To follow up on

Things of interest.

Weather engineering (and the extension or reduplication of military tactical thinking - not genealogical, but adjacent, para-productive, replicating?). Official bureaus of weather modification (under meteorology - is this what an 'applied' meteorology could look like?)

Weather modification and terraforming - intervention at atmospheric and terrestrial levels - how does one think infrastructure in an airy medium? How does one think about the kind of infrastructure - both physical and organizational - involved in something like a 'hydraulic state,' in relation to the specificities of different phases of matter. That is, is control of water different from management of water through infrastructure which takes always as its mode of operation the manipulation of solids (landscape features, etc)

In any case, control of weather - the inducement of moisture, etc. AO remarks: if Wittfogel writes of a hydraulic despotism, you write of the opposite, the control of dryness. But where dryness is configured as an absence of moisture, does it become the same?

A second episode. Environment as warfare. To consider: 1938 and the Nationalist flooding of the Yellow River. quick-n-dirty reference http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1938_Yellow_River_flood

A third idea. Planting row after row of tree as a living barrier. But life is in time, and the dynamism of ecology also makes way for forms of unadvised growth. Here, an ethic of flourishing cannot hold, and I defer instead to Yi-Fu Tuan's reflections on the desert, wherein its very extraterrestrial facade, a stillness undisturbed by an intrusive vitality, is what lends it its stark beauty. That is, can we complicate an ethics that takes life, above all, as a good (// with the arguments about a neo-fundamentalist will-to-life in Life as Surplus), with an attempt to search out beauty or worth in that for which life is not a resistance but a disturbance?

Many ways to think here. Remember, for instance, the notion of a Mississippi Delta 'dead zone', where 'death' points not to a state of lifelessness but to an excess of unrecognizable living - massive algal blooms that preclude other species, but point to a kind of flourishing. Also sparks Zac C of UCSC and the invasive shad fish that must be destroyed in order to maintain sustainable ecosystemic equilibrium, as well as H Raffles in the NYT etc on the resonances of native species with anti-immigrant things of all kinds.

Spence 102 the search for modern China. "During the second half of the seventeenth century, scholars had been absorbed in searchign out the reason for the collapse of the Ming dynasty....They emphasized the Song because it was then that the philosopher Zhu Xi (d 1200) had given prominence to the view that there were indeed underlying principles (li) that explained heaven's actions and guided human conduct. Understanding such principles, Zhu xi and his later followers believed, would help men to live rationally and in tune with heaven, and would justify the attempts of moral men to find meaning in a public career" (102)

All of this has been procrastination because I had a second idea after the point on terraforming and weather control.

Reading The Country of the Pointed Firs in the Bay Area

Dear all,

I did not know what to expect when I picked up this book to read; I did not know, I suppose, that I would fall in love—the way the mysterious narrator says in the opening paragraph, “The process of falling in love at first sight is as final as it is swift in such a case, but the growth of true friendship may be a lifelong affair.” Falling in love with a single person—final, swift, fateful—yes, but the truth is, I did not fall in love with Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs with swiftness. I wandered in, mildly curious and confused, lulled by the quaint New England rituals and solitudes, until the stories and the daytrips and the dooryard visits began to revolve within me and stir deep pangs of longing.

Part of this, I believe, must have something to do with the narrator herself—a writer of some sort on her summer retreat at Dunnet Landing, well-traveled but having chosen to seclude herself in this tiny fishing village on the coast of Maine, who finds herself tempted so much by the gossip and chatter and characters at her lodgings with Mrs. Todd’s that she rents an abandoned schoolroom on a hill to work during the daytime. These are, of course, details gleaned over the course of reading the novella—of herself, her history and particulars, the narrator is inconspicuously silent as we join her in marveling at these beautiful, enduring people of Dunnet Landing. It isn’t until the third page into the novella that we’re graced with the first “I”—until then, a third-person omniscient voice seems ready to carry the entire narrative.

This strangely distant, yet acknowledged and appealed to narrator of Pointed Firs brings together both remoteness and warmth; Mrs. Blackett smiles at her and squeezes her hand, Elijah Tilley invites her to his house for dinner, countless people turn to her as the medium of their lives—yet we know nothing about her own loves and dreams, except that she writes and fishes, and would sooner surrender herself to self-forgetfulness than to solitary work: “…as we turned away, I saw a flutter of white go past the window as I left the schoolhouse and my morning’s work to their neglected fate.” How much I, too, am easily lured away from my writing!

Besides the narration, something else held me back sometimes, and that is its quaintness—so quaint and picturesque and off-key. The picture book view of the folk of Dunnet Landing reminded me very much of Washington Irving’s Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, which is filled quaint, little cottages and tombstones, and is narrated by a similarly romantic writer. In Pointed Firs, however, there is something pitifully pathetic in the stories recounted, like shriveled blackberries on the stem that had too little sun and too many harsh sea gusts to let them ripen. There is something ludicrous in the Queen’s Twin who is convinced that she and the Queen of England lead parallel lives, who cuts out magazine photographs of the royal family and makes gauzy, fanciful frames for each relative; something petty in the way Mrs. Todd, as generous and spritely as she is, dismisses others for being dull or stingy. Yet we are asked to love these earnest and simple people because, as Mrs. Todd says, “Don’t it show that for folks that have any fancy in ‘em, such beautiful dreams is the real part o’ life? But to most folks the common things that happens outside ‘em is all in all.”

I am aware that my own idealism, which makes me cling to these quaint little stories, is quite laughable, that my naïveté might be discounted as the strange fruit of ivory towers and pastoral commons. Yesterday, sitting outside “Brainwash café” in its own bubble in SOMA, I was told just as much by someone who is far more realistic, and being a lawyer, far more concerned about clauses and provisions for off-chances and eventualities, far more shrewd about diction and loopholes for profits and tax breaks. Yet even he cannot live without his dreams, for what is an iPhone and a MacBook but sleek modern versions of magazine cutouts? What is this mania for information at your fingertips but another kind of distraction? Mrs. Todd says discerningly of the Queen’s Twin, “I expect all this business about the Queen has buoyed her over many a shoal place in her life. Yes, you might say that Abby’d been a slave, but there ain’t any slave but has some freedom.” I have always thought that self-proclaimed idealists are the true pessimists because we believe so resolutely in misery that we’ll see every silver lining in the gloom and doom while the realists simply read the day’s weather report and plan accordingly.

I refuse to plan accordingly, I’d rather be accused of the albeit artificial and self-imposed ignorance and vanity that allows a sense of surprise in a world where there is nothing new under the sun. Surprise. This is my mantra against knowledge and complacency, prejudice and practicalities. Though we may all of us be prisoners or slaves of this hard, unsympathetic world we live in, I think our mantras and manias save us and give us sustenance and society in our loneliest hour. At the very least we recognize another’s loneliness by the forlorn or listless look that mirrors our own, and there is some fellowship of solitary dreamers that leads us to leave small offerings of kinship, sympathy, or tribute to each other. Each letter I write is in some way an offering of that sort.

Here is the line in Pointed Firs that captured for me that cold, austere New England air “of some ethereal northern sort, with a cool freshness as if it came over new-fallen snow”: “In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness; we are each the uncompanioned hermit and recluse of an hour or a day; we understand our fellow of the cell to whatever age of history they may belong.”

Here in the Bay Area, we haven’t the hundreds of secluded islands that splinter off the coast of Maine. We have, instead, blustery winds that sweep through the marsh grasses and carry in a sea layer of fog that hugs our coastlines and overshadows our peninsulas; dry yellow hills that roll gently into the marshes or into our suburbs and into the bay; grey mudflats and grey industrial walls and debris. We have a loneliness of length that stretches in one long unbroken path upon a levy from inland canyon into the flat sheen of the salt ponds; a loneliness of sprawl that builds tract houses from hillside to the last stretch of infill; and a loneliness of highways that cuts through our cities and replaces distance with endless longing or euphoric independence. People come to the very edges of the golden state to reach the ends of this long loneliness, and there, I trust, they often find that they can go no farther and make their home upon its shores.

I, for one, am still longing for more and have sent out this length of words into the winds. (Play here Mary Poppins' "Let's go fly a kite!") :-)

Much love,
Jules

Animal Incompletion

So this theme has come up over and over again - I don't know exactly
how to work it into my own work - and it seems definitely to hinge on
a different kind of reflection, one that bears on a more properly
'anthropological' problem, in the sense of it being a philosophical
reflection on the 'human' as such. The question is what defines the
specificity of 'human,' on what grounds can the human be legislated as
an entity different from animals, most obviously, but also from
machines, from gods. This again is part of a longer series - I've
reflected on this in some of my papers, but it also seems like this is
the question that motivates a long of early anthropology - that is, in
defining an object for the discipline, there emerges a kind of
reflection of what is proper to the human as a way of thinking what is
proper to the discipline. In this sense, Agamben writes of the
anthropological machine, that which serves the sole purpose of
producing the human.

Of course this is a really complex topic, so I think I wouldn't do it
all at once here. But I will at least want to pass through a couple
of key points that are anchoring this reflection. So Marx, Derrida
(Lacan), Arendt, but also Boas, Herder, Levi-Strauss. The point of
this wouldn't to be to work toward but to work through a critical
animality studies, to think what animality will ultimately offer us,
which, I think/hope will be a way of thinking of an anthropology that
will really problematize this question of the human again. So in
broad strokes, the way I imagine this working is something like this:

a) there is a sense in which human difference from other living beings
hinges on a couple of possibilities:
1: something that serves as a supplement, something additional to the
mere physicality of the animal body
1a: this is either a species-level biological trait or something that
must be developed either by the self or in the society of others.
That is, we either have a vision of the human species at the level of
the individual body, or the human as a social animal, whereby the
human body is already propped through multiple connections with
others. The problem here is that we have conflicting ideas of where
the human begins - is it individual or is it social, and what will be
the status of something extra/over the animal that needs to be
developed amongst others - and so, human difference must be cultivated
in a relationship with the other (human). This is Aristotle on the
polis, which I may come back to through Arendt.

But the problem anyway is that you'd need to be able to determine what
the basic unit of the human is, and if we mean to say that the human
is in fact a social animal, what the condition of his being-human is,
if there is in fact a condition of its activation (being amongst
people), how is the human not in fact given as a condition of the
human body. The other possibility is that the human difference lays
in a potentiality, the potential of becoming-human, where the
ontological status of the human is a potential to become human?

2: a prior condition of lack, where the human exists in fulfilling a
need that other animals can do 'naturally.' Most often, this is
framed in terms of a lack of instinct, where the human is that animal
that is woefully ill-equipped to survive, where there is a gap between
nature and human requirements. I think we see this in Nietzsche, in
Marx, in Derrida, in Herder (especially on language)

But here, culture is that which develops to fill the gap. Perhaps
culture is 'instinctual' in the sense that people must have culture
(and this is where Levi-Strauss, in his search for
funadmental/elemntary forms becomes really interesting). So here's an
interesting point, that Derrida gets into a lot, which is that Lacan
is very interested in what he takes as a human capacity to respond
rather than just react - I would want to argue that response is based
on its fallibility, or rather, the possibility of its not happening or
happening in a different way. This way, response is about a capacity
for difference, which is more interesting to consider then in these
terms: human is that which has the possibility of different
possibilities.

Anyway, I always start writing and then can't keep my attention, and I
let my thoughts pool up and never say what I need to say.

So here:

What is the human? That which makes, which is made, insofar as it is
an incomplete animal (or animals are incomplete humans?).
This makes anthropogenesis as a figure of what people make very interesting.

Alternatively, anthropogenesis might be analyzed as a kind of slogan,
a semiotic process by which 'the human' becomes the privileged
perspective through which everything will be understood. I am
thinking of how the colonial project is similar, in that it seeks to
have everything pass through it, where the empire becomes the conduit
through which all knowledge must pass. Like an electromagnet, it
orients all toward itself.

What am I working through? I don't want to reproduce the kind of
analysis that says that human is that which destroys, but I also don't
want to think about human as that which creates, either. I would want
to think of the human as part of a process without a necessary
subject, or that can't be apprehended as a process at all, insofar as
'process' assumes a kind of normative structure in time already..

Who knows?

Re: [reading in] Reading Huckleberry Finn and Vanguardistas in Berkeley

Just a reflection. From behind the firewall. Today, I was pleasantly
surprised by my improvement in Chinese in the last month, I had this
moment of pure amazement at my own ability - these moments are few and
far between, amazed by my capacity to circumlocute, to sound like I'm
still learning the language and yet, not also sound like an idiot. I
could reflect on this point all day, but I won't.

But I did enjoy reading Juliana's post, I had this monstrous feeling
of simultaneity in space, what's the word? Of being in many places at
the same time, or having the feeling that one's position is expansive,
that spaces are connected in ways that rely on and transcend their own
physicality. Or maybe this is only to say that spatiality is mediated
by imagination and experience, filtered through the spatial
epistemologies we exercise as cognitive maps. I'm remember this
moment in that interview, Latour and Serres, that we read earlier -
where he talks about time and topology, that science of expanding
plastic sheets, where bunching up and impossible expansion produce an
experience of temporality as overlapping. We live in the overlap of
time on itself, and perhaps to that we may add the overlap of spaces.

How, in the extended cough that is Beijing air, how do I miss sunny
Berkeley where one never thinks about humidity? What this group needs
is a way of talking about weather, then, in this moment of global
atmospheric systems, which is basically the climatological incarnation
of a set of problems that as an anthropologist I suppose we think
about a lot - how do you talk about connection without subsuming
infinite interconnection to a kind of globalizing sameness. How do we
experience the alterity of spaces themselves while also recognizing
their interconnection? (Or am I just a climate ideologist, woefully
committed to my Spaceship Earth?).

But the question that Jules raised is a haunting question. I'm
suddenly reminded of Maxine Hong Kingston, but only because of the
phrase 'a childhood among ghosts' or something to that effect, and
through that, to the figure of the specter. I haven't read Huckleberry
Finn in ages, but my imagined Huck Finn is vivid, if possibly
inaccurate. The specter of slavery is already a glaring presence,
the horror of slavery is the condition of his narrative, and it
undergirds his corn-pone days lazing on the river. The horror of
slavery is physically manifest in the brute physicality of Jim's
blackness, in the course of his interactions with people and things on
the course of the river. The raft is a kind of liminal space where it
seems that Huck himself, passing through, is as haunting as the
spectacle of slavery, that in its very omnipresence is also ominously
absent in the book. Who is whose specter, here? Can we imagine
liminality with the caveat that liminality will always be an
in-between, where the precondition of the liminal is this structural
in-between-ness that presupposes and depends upon those stages that it
marks? Or here, will the raft be an inside outside, a space marked
not by its exteriority but by its being inside of the world from which
it seeks an escape.

Here, the terms of 'escape' are already overdetermined by a kind of
socius that works by orienting everything toward itself, by forcing
everything to pass through itself - literally, in that the raft flows
down the river thoroughfare that is also the main artery of a regional
plantation economy (and in this way, the river is both the way out
while paradoxically the precondition of the slave-driven economy
itself) - and then, figuratively, in that slavery will present itself
irresistably as a kind of epistemological conduit (that mirrors the
river itself), in that it forces all discourse to pass through itself,
even that which tries to escape it. After all, disavowal depends on
the originary presence of the disavowed, the escape reifies what is
being escaped. I guess I see a parallel here in the colonial project,
that 'gift of a world,' in which the colony orients all knowledge
toward itself, like one of those magnets that makes the iron in your
sand form neat lines which turn toward a center, or in more
charismatic forms of discourse that have the principle effect and
condition of asserting their very necessity in their capacity to
redirect knowledge toward themselves.

Sorry, this is incomprehensible. I'm thinking through something else,
and it seems that this trope repeats itself all over the place.

<3 <3 <3

Reading Huckleberry Finn and Vanguardistas in Berkeley

Dears,

This is a much elaborated letter that I originally wrote in shorter form to another friend in France: The last few days have been spectacularly hot (by northern CA standards) and the carpet of my apartment is cut up by bright, sun-filled patches of heat. I don't know what is wrong with me, maybe it's the leftover pizza I've had for breakfast (and cheese not agreeing with my lactose-intolerant stomach), but these same days have left me closemouthed and shellshocked in Spanish class. My teacher pokes me ever so gently every hour or so, Juliana, ¿quieres decir algo, o Juliana, ¿tienes una pregunta? but I'm underwater somewhere, or under shimmering heat waves.

For homework, we had to write a poem in response to the poetry of visiting poet Arturo Dávila (the polyptotonic redundancy of poe-poe-poe-, I hope, you'll take as a sign of my groan of frustration when we were given this assignment; there is so much bad poetry, I think, because we are told to write poetry in this way—as homework, as an outlet, as leftovers and throwaways).

I'm not a poet, and I don't write poetry except maybe once every five years, but as you mentioned the things left out, the missed encounters and misunderstandings, and the detritus in your last email, I thought I'd share the piece I finally wrote—not as sobras y restos, but as something extra, superfluous, and spontaneous. I realize that many of these words are all near synonyms, but there’s a difference among the bits and pieces that slip out of our hands—some are simply throwaways, some continue to haunt us (like the Steve McQueen film you described), some we keep chasing. Too much of my writing, and the writing that I read, is a mere listing of things. The “list” is a great temptation—it gives the appearance of, if not encompassing everything, then the massive quantity of what more there is to list, if only the list could go on.

But the “list” is a lie; it captures all the wrong bits and pieces so that its abundance is the mire of trash. I want to be saved by something beyond this great listing of things—maybe by rhythm, by the drawing out of things, which is the slipperiness of figuration, by hunger for something not there rather than satisfaction of what is there (“donde hubo manzana/ solo queda un hambre;//donde hubo palabras/ (potros o toros/ sujetos) queda la severa/ forma del vacío” – João Cabral de Melo Neto):

“Tomo esta evanescencia y lubricidad de todos los objetos, que les deja deslizarsenos de las manos cuando los agrarramos más, a ser la parte más innoble de nuestra condición.” –Emerson

Respuesta a Naufragio

El sueño es una migaja triste
Que el pájaro pequeño comió
Y después se acostó en tierra
Con las garras arriba al cielo

La mañana no trae su canción
Y las alas no vuelan de nuevo
Pero nadie nota la omisión
Donde anidan los pensamientos

(The first line is taken from Dávila’s poem “Naufragio.”)

I finished reading yesterday Huckleberry Finn—someone (Jenn Liu) told me over the weekend that the huckleberry plant is renowned for being undomesticatable; it won't bear fruit if you try to cultivate it in the garden (and just now, a quick online search tells me that it has to do with elevation. Huckleberries grow wild at high elevation where deep snows insulate buds and shoots; but tend to freeze in the open coldness at lower elevations.) My first point of reference was Thoreau's huckleberries and their elusive and essential ambrosia, but of course! Huck Finn is the embodiment of undomesticatability.

I fell in love with Huck Finn as he went along his way down the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers (so much so that I hated the part where Tom Sawyer came in, or where anyone else took too much of a share in the dialogue). I loved his voice, his easy acceptance of everything, mum on all things disagreeable, and going at turning and thinking, turning and thinking. There are a few people whose voices I have fallen in love with—and they are people not quite from the South, but with a lump of the South in their throat so that they catch you unawares with slight drawls and infinitesimal caesuras. I am thinking of two people in particular—his has a velvety smoothness, hers a grainier catch. Huck’s voice goes in hops and skips, yet in the main, straightforwardly on, and it carries you forward so gently that you forget its relentless power to wash over and blandish things.

But mostly I felt for Huck’s lonesomeness—which is different from when he is lazying about with Jim, a "solid lonesomeness" "listening to the stillness" in the company of someone familiar. There is another lonesomeness deep in the droning insects, the rustling leaves, and the hum of a spinning wheel, when the buoyancy of Huck’s voice seems to falter and the suspense of the moment is something out of his hands. These are the times when we suddenly hear the frailty of our own voices, the slightness of its timbers and cords, and every knot and tie that holds it together is poised to unravel. It is when we have only our own voices to trust that we are most alone in the world.

At some point, I tired of the circles of discussion, platicando platicando, and I remembered suddenly that these words which I puzzled over and rearranged and loved were just words, that there was some gap between the words and the feeling. Maybe it has to do with the Girondo and his “Apuntes callejeros,” vanguardista to the hilt. Somewhere along the lines of experimental poetry, the words detached themselves from all reference and became literal puzzle pieces and ingots of steel. I said that the apuntes were observations scribbled en tranvía and trailed off in the form of ellipses, each estrofa un apunte that gets shorter and shorter until cut off. It was only later that I felt abandoned or my brain lulled while my stomach dealt with lactose, and I wondered what hole I'd dug myself into with all these words. (Only now do I understand why Girondo’s sombra throws itself into the spinning wheels; or as Huck says, “I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead.”)

Yesterday I took a nap during the hot afternoon slump and hoped that things would take a turn for the better. Phoebe and I bicycled down California, stopping at a farmer’s market down by Milvia where I picked up some peaches, to Monterey Market on Gilman where I picked up some nectarines and pluots. I bought some black mustard seeds from Lhasa Karnak because I’ve been dreaming about that upma and those green beans that I had at my sister’s in-law’s place. Today Lisa is visiting so we’ll pick up some cheese as a side and I’ll fry up the turbot sole, and the upma and green beans will have to wait until next week.

p.s. A response to Jerry: Strangely enough, I met Amitav Ghosh back in my college days when I took a class he taught on “archives” and read a mishmash of books that all touched upon archival materials but remained (in my poor bewildered undergraduate brain) intransigently disconnected from each other. But to return to what it is to “write history in the form of a novel”—I thought about this in Huckleberry Finn, which can be read as a nostalgic representation of life in the Mississippi Valley “forty to fifty years ago”—a history of the South, of slavery, and growing up.

It was difficult for me to reconcile that lulling effect of Huck’s narrative style with the cruelties and injustices that he encounters, and I think this is part of the conundrum that Twain’s notice at the beginning of the novel states: “Persons attempting to find a Motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a Moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a Plot in it will be shot.”

How can we be nostalgic about a South that was horrific, abusive, and yet honey-loving, and corn pone-filled? What sort of political commentary is Twain making about the violence (and artifice) that knits together the South with its feuds and brawls, loafing and humbugging? To say that this is no commentary and no moral lesson, and damned if I am nostalgic, is maybe one way to deal with the messiness and relentlessness of life—but only in retrospect.

It is at heart a deeply pragmatic way to shuffle through the debris of the past and into the care of providence, but it eschews a regular plan of action and offers no impetus for change in the present. To me, that is part of the stalemate in Burma—what oversight allows its people to be simply lulled over again and again and what foresight (or lonesomeness) will provide the moment of stillness to make the decision to “go to hell,” to risk all morals and principles, and all interest and welfare, for someone else’s freedom (as Huck does for Jim)?

p.p.s. Speaking of shipwrecks and freedom and being passed over, a story someone retold to me over the weekend about Vietnamese refugees: https://www.dw.kqed.org/tv/programs/archive/index.jsp?pgmid=17330&date=20090501

Reading Portrait of a Lady in Berkeley

Oh dear, I completely forgot to check the blog! Here is one I wrote a month ago exactly!

June 14, 2009

Dear Irene,

Your little letter was a splash of sunshine here in cloudy Berkeley. We seem to need quite a bit of coaxing before the heat manages to dissolve the grey and let the afternoon sun shine through. I like to imagine you speaking French in your light, lissome voice, in an open roof car (what are those called?), full of people gesticulating loudly, the stereo blasting some high-stepping accordion music, the conversation rollicking through English and French and Korean and Italian. How was the lunch party in the burbs?

Despite the quaint m’lonesome’s and m’love’s in your letter, I highly doubt that you play the old maid very well. You are too sweet; I think everyone will fall in love with you, I think everyone has fallen in love with you already. I feel a bit like Henrietta in The Portrait of a Lady, which I just read, who is fortitudinously vigilant over Isabel Archer’s propensity to go off in zigzags. I don’t mean that you suffer the “sin of self-esteem” and regard for one’s own opinions that Isabel does, only that I wouldn’t be surprised if you received a proposal here and there that forces you into “a thousand ridiculous zigzags." I am thinking of when we shared our mutually embarrassing stories of obliviously going on dates. Don’t forget to come back to the Bay Area—it will truly be gloomy if you don’t!

Have you done much reading and writing and espresso-ing at the picturesque little cafes of rue des Tessiers? I thought it funny (and notable) that Isabel can never keep her attention on a novel when we as readers do keep our attention on her, or rather, it seems to recall us from our wandering attention (as The Portrait is so long and plodding at times, my attention did wander). Yet other times, and this is so at the end of the novel, our attention is so fixed upon Isabel, so stridently hoping for her happiness that when she departs to her despair, we’re left clutching at her shadow in the most unhandsome way (Emerson wrote, “I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition,” in “Experience”).

More often, we find Isabel “motionless and empty-handed, her eyes bent on the cool green turf of the lawn," a novel forgotten on her lap or neglected on a desk. If it is true, as James writes, that a “well-chosen volume” can help “to transfer the seat of consciousness to the organ of pure reason”; then it is also true that the moulds of reason have their limitations. James’ novels are not philosophical treatises, and so the practice of reading a novel is not quite inhabiting this “organ.” But it is inhabiting another point-of-view, even if only parenthetically, as in the remarkable feat of readerly perception Ralph performs: “He bethought himself that persons, in her view, were simple and homogenous organism…." And so this is the kind of inhabiting that we do as we traipse and trespass through the consciousnesses of James’ characters. But like Ralph, we find that our view is not, after all, from within Isabel’s shelter of mind, but locked out from it and peering as through a microscope or listening with a stethoscope into it. And I find this limit (and modesty for his characters’ privacy—who would have thought that eavesdropping is more courteous?) most striking in the curious turns of phrases from the narrator: “We know how much she like Lord Warburton…” or “I have already had reason to say that Isabel knew her husband to be displeased…," and most pointedly, “The working of this young lady’s spirit was strange, and I can only give it to you as I see it…." These foreground the deductive logic of the narrator’s position; it reminds us that we are always ever on the outside of someone else’s house.

In The Portrait, I do not think it is just Ralph and Osmond who think of “life as a matter of connoissership." All the characters desperately collect and clutch at things and peoples. What is most frightening, and perhaps even more relevant to us in our so-called digital age, is that they collect not just objects, and everything that can be turned into an object, but also minds. We like to think of the mind as infinite, volatile, and uncontainable; freedom of speech is only as good as freedom of the mind. Yet description fails even to capture what the mind is. We liken it to the soul, the heart, the brain, an aura, a fragrance—“a certain garden-like quality, a suggestion of perfume and murmuring boughs, of shady bowers and lengthening vistas."

I thought that since you thought about “things” in Jane Eyre, you might find this thing-like quality of the mind as perfume and gardens interesting, too. And even this mind may be annexed the way Osmond wishes to appropriate Isabel’s, “attached to his own like a small garden-plot to a deer-park." That is the sadness of The Portrait; the overwhelming sense that Isabel’s mind must retreat further and further into the shade; that her mind may be caught in the vise of another’s will. But is it ever? When we step away from the doorsteps of Isabel’s house, can we believe, as she says, that “We see our lives from our own point of view; that is the privilege of the weakest and humblest of us…."

Have I bored you yet in this rather long-winded and impersonal treatise? If I have, then I have succeeded in convincing you that my mind is, quite unfortunately and unexceptionally, my own and no one else’s. If I haven’t, then we’ve temporarily achieved a laudable cohabitation. I watched, yesterday, the new Pixar/Disney movie Up, which takes this theme of house to a most delightful and poignant (at least as poignant as cartoon animation can get) incarnation. I found none of the characters wholly loveable, and I think that is their charm. If you go to see it, tell me what you think.

These Pixar movies represent to me the revival of a classic art form—if we can call statues classic, then we can call cartoons classic. In Rome, Isabel sits for long meditations in the company of Greek sculptures, “under the charm of their motionless grace, wondering to what, of their experience, their absent eyes were open, and how, to our ears, their alien lips would sound." Cartoons display this same alien subjectivity, and this is most apparent in the episodes that go entirely without human dialogue. The by-now famous amuse-bouche of Pixar movies are the animated film shorts, which have been (at least all the ones I’ve seen) inventive pure storytelling in the form of nonhuman shape and sound without dialogue except in caws, grumbles, and chirps. Hemming and hawing at its best.

I hate to end on a sad note especially when I have no reason to do so, except that the old man in Up also reminds me of this sadness, but I love this passage so much I want to share it with you here. And as we are among Greek statues, why not continue with Roman ruins? “She had long before this taken old Rome into her confidence, for in a world of ruins the ruin of her happiness seemed a less unnatural catastrophe. She rested her weariness upon things that had crumbled for centuries and yet still were upright; she dropped her secret sadness into the silence of lonely places, where its very modern quality detached itself and grew objective, so that as she sad in a sun-warmed angle on a winter’s day, or stood in a mouldy church to which no one came, she could almost smile at it and think of its smallness."

Like Isabel, I take great comfort in my own smallness, but I think it is too easy to bewilder ourselves with our surroundings and convince ourselves of our insignificance. It is more difficult to believe in our significance, at least it is for me. I spend most of my day reading and writing; I go outside to play tennis with Shu Ping at Willard Park, to bike to the AMC in Emeryville, to go grocery shopping at the new Berkeley Bowl down by my dance class on Heinz. The busy little circles I’ve made for myself are not unnatural and I have little real desire to widen the circles except in restless imagination. Yet I am aware that to believe in the significance of that smallness as some mode of welfare is also paradoxically immodest and egotistic and too apparently impotent. I don’t know if this letter suffices as an answer to Isabel who “often checked herself with the thought of the thousands of people who were less happy than herself—a thought which for the moment made her fine, full consciousness appear a kind of immodesty. What should one do with the misery of the world in a scheme of the agreeable for oneself?"

Much love,
Jules