Crucible

Radio silence until June 1. The thesis and three papers are all due on May 29. May God have mercy on our souls.

the promise of June

One More Night in Leuven

In the afternoon, a surprise storm blasts Leuven with bizarrely-intense rainfall. I hear a rumble grow in our apartment and assume that a pot is coming to a boil on the stove. A sideways glance reveals roommate Dan in mid-reaction to something outside. I stand and look: water from the sky is roaring on the glass. The pot in the kitchen is drying on the rack.

I walk to an unlatched window that has blown open and the force of the storm astonishes me; I haven’t seen rain like this for a long time. Agitated and smiling, I superfluously yell down to a drenched bro running in the courtyard “run, bro!”, and this earns me a middle finger. The bro and I both laugh. He probably didn’t understand me. Twenty minutes later, a rainbow arcs out to the south; it looks as though it was painted on a photograph. Before I can take a second picture with Dan’s camera the color fades into the sky. My soul throws Dan's camera out the window in frustration before my physical hands return it to him.

Sci-Fi Thought Experiment

A kind of hominid on a planet like ours has evolved with a head that is tilted at a 90º angle, so that the chin of the skull fuses with the top of the chest; the survival of the species is miraculous and a result of an astoundingly high mean intelligence. Forward motion induces vertigo for these creatures' being unable to set their eyes on a point in the middle distance, as we do; they survived for ages in sheer cliff dwellings, are excellent climbers, and have developed a civilization that ingeniously accommodates their apparent biological deformity. Unable to look up at the sky or out at their larger surroundings without great difficulty, they have constructed enormous cities with tiny architectural footprints; these towers are built to resemble the cliffs that sheltered the species in the early days of its history.

To compensate with technology for the cruel genetic hand that nature somehow dealt them, these creatures have devised a video monitor system that affixes to their clothing with a special apparatus; it displays an image directly under the earth-pointed face of its wearer. The image is of the area directly in front of the creature, and so mimics what we understand to be normal human sight. Rapid forward motion, however—whether from running or piloting a vehicle—is experienced as psychically akin to falling, because falling is the only visual analogue available to them for it. Genetic memory therefore makes long-distance travel terrifying, and the new technology has inspired a genre of fiction that mythologizes horizontal motion, and plumbs the psychological depths of the minds of those so unfortunate as to undergo it. In these works, which are intelligible to us as poetry, a full-speed run may tear a rip in the fabric of reality, and pilots spontaneously catch fire, and walking around on the ground outside a village may cause it to collapse into a sudden abyss. Speed as such is a cultural wellspring of dread and provides a context in which daring and fear alike are made manifest.

How to Store Your Books If You Are Awesome and Rich

I thought of this the other day while talking with roommate Dan about interesting ways to store books. I couldn't find illustrations online for anything close to what I had in mind, so I downloaded a free drawing program from the app store and attempted to sketch out my idea. Here goes:

First, imagine that you own a house with a large basement or ground-level room. The floor is basically composed of congruent glass panels set in a grid pattern, like so:

I had to clear out the furniture to draw this picture.

The glass is reinforced—it's like, an inch thick and bulletproof—which allows people to walk over it and place furniture on top of it. You are probably wondering why there is a hazy blush of color in the center of each of those transparent or translucent (homeowner's choice) glass panels, huh? Well, I'll tell you why! It's because underneath each panel is an inset storage shelf, upon which has been placed a row of books! Seen from the perspective of a person standing on this floor, the vertical alcoves would look something like this:

A first edition of Yale Press's 1954 The Future: Progressive Essays in Experimental Ontology anthology? Amazing!

How might a person go about accessing the books they put under their glass floor? Did I hear that question correctly? I  sure hope so, because that's precisely the question I was about to answer. Notice that on the right side of each glass pane, there is a pair of dots. Those dots represent small holes, the rims of which would be specially reinforced with rubber O-rings. Why is this important? Because you, as the owner of this classy, bookish basement, have in your possession a grip with two prongs that are designed to fit into the holes on these glass panels. Each prong would terminate in a curve designed to slide into a groove under the glass, for a close and sure fit. 

The backwards beamed eighth notes pictured are actually the grip. 

When the prongs go in, the attached grip becomes a handle with which you may open the glass panel! Each pane will turn on a hinge that allows it to open like a square glass door. You know what that means? It means that with this grip, you have exclusive, easy access to your basement library! When you're finished retrieving the tomes you want, you can close the panel, remove the grip, and hang it back up on the bronze hook you installed in your kitchen, closet or panic room. 

What pretty pastel-colored spines your books have!

And there you have it. So, if you're a wealthy homeowner with a large spare room that's got a high ceiling (this design would move the level of the floor up a couple feet), and you happen to own a lot of books, you should consider storing them in this way—under a beautiful, thick plane of square glass panels. You could even line the walls with traditional standing bookshelves, especially ones made of fragrant wood, like pine. People would walk into that room and say things like, "I am in a great hall of knowledge!", "this person is serious about book storage!", "what a great-smelling repository of literature and philosophy!", and so forth. Who doesn't like compliments?

* * *

UPDATE: In light of my usual standard of scrupulousness when it comes to citing my sources, I am a tad bit ashamed to admit that Dan was the one who originally introduced the idea of the glass floor. When I started writing and sketching the above yesterday, I was operating with the sincere belief that I was the originator of the idea, but alas! It came out in conversation today that Dan is the true source. Consider the above an appropriation and development of his original idea, which emerged in rapid-fire brainstorming (hence the mistake). Sorry Dan! 

Love: a Tough Business

I know I said I wouldn't be posting again for a while but I decided to take a moment anyway to put up a couple stanzas from a poem I like. In doing so, I offer you my inaugural procrastination post. Presently I am avoiding a short paper for our Medieval Philosophical Texts course, for which we are supposed to develop conceptions of Creation in the work of different medieval Islamic philosophers. I know, the idea made me yawn too. Jeremy is still yawning and he finished his paper hours ago.

So this comes from a poem by W. H. Auden, and it's pretty serious.

O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress;
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless. 

O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You must love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart. 

- W. H. Auden, from "As I Walked Out One Evening"

As Auden sees it, we're real bastards, mostly, and to love one another in spite of ourselves is both necessary and miraculous. There is some comfort in the idea that, although loving another person purely may be impossible on this side of the eschaton, it is nonetheless true that "if you do not love, your life will flash by." I suppose that a person's understanding of this idea approaches its resonance frequency in her life when, against all naiveté, she also comes to understand that by choosing to love, she is opting into a tremendously difficult and frequently unpleasant business. Tough crackers for those of us who would rather rid ourselves of all the garbage that goes along with living in our scummy world, and carve out a perfect space in which we may love perfect people perfectly without a shred of selfishness or doubt. Tough crackers for us. 

The poem is worth reading in its entirety if you have a couple minutes, which should be sufficient for giving it a visual sweep and a few seconds of reflection. Be warned, it's a very sober delving into the ceaseless march of time, through us and always away from us. In example:

'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.'

So, love: a tough business, yeah, and I suppose the situation is made all the more serious by how little time we have. That's all.