Le Monde 100: The Second Sex

            The mathematics that are involved in the sonar of the bat are incredibly complicated. The concepts of distance, triangulation, and velocity are best understood by super computers and advanced algorithms. However, the bat knows nothing about the algebraic numbers and figures that is uses to navigate the dark with instantaneous reaction time. The bat's knowledge is innate and organic. It arose in it instinctively.

            Likewise, I feel the same way about the concepts of feminism. Until I read The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, I always felt a need to buck against any pre-conceived notions of what a woman should and shouldn't be, and to reject any assumptions of woman's role in the home.
            But, conditioning can play with one's instincts. At family dinners, there is a ritual that seems to be not unusual in regards to the power relationships with men and women. It is be quite typical in families like mine, which is half-Italian and half-British, both of which display the same behavior. The women or woman of the house is cooking dinner in the house while the men wait with drinks in another room. The men sit at the table with the eldest men at the position of power at either end of the table. Dinner is served with the women catering to the accoutrement of the men. After dinner, women will clear the table while men "talk" about "important issues."
           It is very easy to fall into this pattern as an emerging man, especially when actively promoted as correct by elders. On more than one occasion, I was urged to sit back down as I started to help clear dishes because it was women's work, and now I sometimes have to push down sub-conscious feelings of entitlement when confronted with this situation.
           Simone de Beauvoir is a mad genius of feminism. The length and breadth of her discussion of woman's role within nature and society is so deep it seems like multiple authors had a hand in this book. The Second Sex is to feminism as advanced mathematics is to the bat's sonar. Feminism is an ideal that executes the concept that woman is an individual, and as the importance of the individual increases as time goes on, the importance of feminism increases as well.
            At first, I was irritated at a lot of her examples of the female condition as I thought they were mere hyperbole used to prove a point. But, I soon realized that extreme and varied experiences demonstrate the many forms of the feminine experience, and that experience is entirely created by the individual. After reading The Second Sex, I now understand that to say that one knows what it is to be objectively feminine is extreme arrogance, especially if a man is saying it.
           If a woman wants to clear the table and serve her guests, that's fine. It's her decision. It's okay to have whatever role makes one happy. But, it is when her role is pre-defined do we find concepts that can crush her.



           

Le Monde 100: Waiting For Godot

"It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance..." - Henry James

When I was a very young person, I was deposited by my father on one of his renovation jobs. Everyone on this job was very busy and engaged in their own particular tasks - installing a handrail, grouting the kitchen bathroom, building a wall...e.t.c. I was to act as a general helper and assist everyone as the need arose.

But, instead of fulfilling my father's vision of a diligent son, I actually became the equivalent of a talking orangutan in my productivity and spent the whole time playing, wandering, and nosing about. In time, my uselessness reached a fever pitch and the foreman, a gruff bald man in suspenders, planted me in a chair next to a telephone and told me not to get up.

"This job is going to be the most important one in the house. This telephone might ring and you need to sit here and answer it. You can't leave this phone for a second, not until we leave."

I waited there all day for the phone to ring and, of course, it never did. It's quite possible that it wasn't plugged in.

It was only later did I realize that this was a punishment after a report was delivered to my father.

It didn't seem like a punishment at the time because I truly thought the task of waiting for a telephone to ring gave that waiting meaning. However, it had none in of itself.

In Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett strips down all context and history of his characters to create the existential situation of Vladimir and Estragon, who wait by a lonely tree in the wilderness for a man named Godot, who never comes. As time passes, they fill their time with eating, dancing, singing, crying, talking, thinking, and other mundane tasks over and over in order for them to give themselves the "impression that they exist."

There are so many ways to interpret this play. But it seems to primarily address the need to give one's self a purpose in life in order to fend off the murkiness of the future. Man has an inherent need for closure that conflicts with his inherent need to exist. Throwing one's self into the tasks of life allow one's self to forget about endings and ideals by putting one's consciousness squarely in the present moment.

Purpose in life is always a subjectively crafted thing. The answer isn't the same for everybody. One must decide what one's purpose is and, instead of waiting for a Godot to appear to put a cap on the story, one need only wait for one's self. Even for those of us that believe we have been given a purpose from heaven, the decision is still from within to purpose one's self in that direction.

Looking back at that day by the telephone, I remember being satisfied in the goofiest way possible. Perhaps, I am still that way.

Le Monde 100: Froth on the Daydream

This is what I've been waiting for.

Not only has this book been my favorite book on Le Monde's 100 Books of the Twentieth Century, but it's possibly my new favorite book OF ALL TIME.

Boris Vian sets the stage by underpinning the entire book with a haunting song by Duke Ellington.

This song is so unique that Vian invents a dance that can only be danced to it and one other song called the "oglemee," a dance that requires dancers to undulate a certain distance away from each other at a certain tempo in order to create "a system of waves that present, as in acoustics, nodes, and antinodes, which contribute more than a little to the ambiance on a dance floor." As one advances their skill at the "oglemee," they can, in time develop the skill to produce "parasitic waves by separately putting certain of their limbs into synchronic vibration."

This is all very interesting but the beauty and concepts of music are taken to a more insane level with the invention of the Pianocktail.

I have no doubt that if someone built a Pianocktail in Brooklyn right now, they would dominate the cocktail scene.

Basically, a pianocktail is a piano that has different liquors, spirits, flavorings, and mixers attached to every key. Depending on the length of the note played, these drink parts are dispensed into a glass. So, every song will have a unique drink signature. Amazing!

Here is a rough sketch of a pianocktail.

Honestly, Froth on the Daydream is so good you don't want to end. It's exuberant in its anthropomorphication of everything without coming off as dopey. Plus, the cartoonish quality only amplifies the love story at the center of it.

It's the first book I've read that I've immediately wanted to re-read.

Instead, I'll just watch this pianocktail video.

Le Monde 100: Le Grand Meaulnes (The Lost Estate)

What's wrong with Romanticism?

I failed a certain test of childhood that was presented to me when i was around eight years old. My father worked for a few months on the sprawling estate of Godfrey Rockerfeller. It was a place right out of a Merchant-Ivory film with endless gazebos, stables, and fox hunts. The older couple who were the caretakers were quite taken with me and gave me all sorts of trinkets from the vast stores of left-over throwaway items, buried in the corridors of the basement of the manor. An ornamental jar of vintage marbles makes a particularly vivid memory In my brain.

As I was poring over these colorful orbs with my father, he saw what was perhaps an obsession forming in my eyes about the estate and the mansion, both of which seemed endless. He said to me "The couple who live here like you so much that they asked me if they could adopt you from me." To this day, I don't know if this was true or not.

"They did?", I replied.

"Oh yes. They want you to come live here on the estate. Do you want to do that? Do you want to leave Mom and me and come live with them?"

"Oh yes!" This was without hesitation.

Don't get me wrong. I loved my parents but, at the time, the pull of the estate seemed like the right decision. The look on my father's face taught me a big lesson in maturity and I instantly regretted it. I think that was probably an uncomfortable ride home.

When the Enlightenment sprouted up in the world with its enormous klieg lights shining on reality, it resulted in a certain bleakness that developed in society. The mysteries of life that gave it a certain spirit and soul were disappearing and taking a sense of the divine away from man.

This phenomenon happens to everyone on a smaller scale as they grow older and become more realistic about their ideals. This results in higher intelligence and better decision-making. But, the trade-off for matured wisdom is often a muted passion or, at the very least, an internal fire that is less visceral.

An older man I knew who had just had his first child told me once that the purpose of existence was to have a childhood. No matter how long you live, you can never go back to the state of wonder you have when you first start to coalesce into a conscious being.

This place in ones life is turned into an amazing chateau in Le Grand Meaulnes, where Meaulnes a young boy witnesses a magical fete and encounters a mysterious girl before returning to his real life at school.

He obsesses about returning to the chateau and meeting her again but he has lost the way back to the estate and bemoans his regular life afterward.

Fortunately, he finds the virtues of adulthood and the beauty that can exist outside of perpetual awe. But, it's odd to think of the diminishing returns that come from dreams as they draw closer to reality.

I guess whats wrong with Romanticism is that some people never escape from the bubble that it puts them in. Ideals should be expected to bloom and then fade into reality. Accepting the beauty of both is the way to happiness.

Le Monde 100: For Whom The Bell Tolls

The closest thing I have had to a Hemingway Experience was with my friend M in Eastern Europe. We stumbled upon what I'm pretty sure was a murdered body in the dark, just outside the reach of one of two street lamps on the clay street outside the tenement house where we were living in the basement. At the same moment, the other streetlamp framed the lurking shadows of two men whose demeanor smacked of the all-pervasive Russian Mafia and who we were fairly sure were the murderers of said body.

They were looking right at us.

As our friends encountered the same situation, having to go so far as to sell their cars and move out of the city, we were waiting for this exact thing to happen.

For Whom The Bell Tolls was included in the Le Monde 100 for the impression it made on its readers, which, in this case, impressed them with the theme of man's relationship with death. Hemingway could speak of death so intimately because he was, no doubt, quite acquainted with it due to the fact that, not only was he an ambulance driver and a soldier who was seriously injured, he also miraculously survived a plane crash. When you look death in the face so often, it may become a friend or, at least, a respected acquaintance. The fact that Hemingway ended up killing himself testifies to his recognition of the usefulness or the lack of fear of death.

Thus, his characters in For Whom The Bell Tolls face death as a necessary part of life. Robert Jordan, the main character who meets the love of his life 24 hours before he is fairly certain that he is going to die, is commited to living the embodiment of an entire lifetime in that one day. The gypsies and mountain people, both men and women, are committed to dying in the name of duty against the fascists and in the name of the common good.

This is an amazing mirror of the viewpoint of Hemingway. However, it also counterpoints my complete estrangement with death. M's coping skills and my own were revealed as we hid in the dark hallways of a completely strange house while waiting for morning, cursing each other and ourselves in this new and strange face of death.

Our coping skills had come to light and found severely lacking. My only hope is that the next time I come so close to death I will recognise and be much more comfortable with its presence.