A crooked mile

There was a crooked man
And he walked a crooked mile,
He found a crooked sixpence
Against a crooked stile.
He had a crooked cat
Who caught a crooked mouse
And they all lived together
In a little crooked house.

All of my miles have been crooked. I couldn’t go straight if I tried. People who talk in straight lines – theirs is a lonely and enviable calmness of mind. Or so it seems.

Ah, to be crazy like a fox. Weaving in and out of hedges, jumping ditches, skulking through the corn. The crafty opportunist, the mighty slayer of field mice.

It’s true that an old housemate of mine used to claim I bore an uncanny resemblance to Redd Foxx’s character on Sanford and Son. What resemblance the actor bore to his animal namesake we could well dispute. (I’m sure there’s a story there, but I don’t know it.) In any case, I’d much rather be a gray fox, reclusive inhabitant of the deep forest, climber of trees, halfway between a dog and a cat.

Contrary, my mother used to call me (and still does on occasion). If there are only two alternatives I’ll look for a third. In the company of boosters I’m an aginner – and vice versa. Even as I type this, the words come out wrong. Flagrantly wrong. Dyslexic. Dyslogic.

In a comment thread, C.B. wonders if I’m that bum outside the 34th street station he gave fifty cents to last Tuesday. No, but I think I could be! In all of literature there is no character I identify with so wholeheartedly as the madman of Chu. This is the guy who is said in the Analects to have accosted Confucius with a song,

Hey Phoenix! Phoenix!
What can anyone really do about the decline of virtue?
It’s useless to blame the past;
You can chase the future if you want.
Enough, enough!
These days it’s worth your life just to take office.

“Confucius got down from his carriage and tried to talk with him, but the man hurried off to avoid him, and he didn’t get the chance.”

This “virtue” (de) can also be translated “power.” It includes both innate ability and cultivated knack or strength of character. (This is the de in Daodejing.)

Zhuangzi gives an expanded version of the madman’s song. In A. C. Graham’s translation:

When Confucius travelled to Ch’u, Chieh Yü the madman of Ch’u wandered at his gate crying

‘Phoenix! Phoenix!
What’s to be done about Power’s decline?
Of the age to come we can’t be sure,
To the age gone there’s no road back.

When the Empire has the Way
The sage succeeds in it.
When the Empire lacks the Way
The sage survives in it.
In this time of ours, enough
If he dodges execution.

Good luck is lighter than a feather,
None knows how to bear its weight.
Mishap is heavier than the earth,
None knows how to get out of its way.

Enough, enough!
Of using Power to reign over men.
Beware, beware!
Of marking ground and bustling us inside.

Thistle, thistle,
Don’t wound me as I walk.
My walk goes backward and goes crooked,
Don’t wound my feet.

The trees in the mountain plunder themselves,
The grease in the flame sizzles itself.
Cinnamon has a taste, so they hack it down.
Lacquer has a use, so they strip it off.

All men know the uses of the useful, but no one knows the uses of the useless.’

“Good luck is lighter than a feather” reminds me of the fellow I read about in the news this morning, a Canadian who managed to sit on his winning lottery ticket, worth $23 million, for close to a year until he had all his ducks in a row. There’s a man of rare virtue! Compared to him, we’re all a little crooked, I guess.

I found a dime
just before that homeless guy saw it.
Felt good all morning.

The Directorate of Joy

Since I don’t have the time for an original entry this morning, here’s something from my files. This appeared as an op-ed in the Centre Daily Times – the main newspaper for the region surrounding Penn State’s University Park campus – back in November 2002. This region is known to Penn State fans and other local boosters as Happy Valley.

A post on “non-lethal” weapons breaks the pattern of non-political or anti-political writing here at Via Negativa, but it does give some background for a passing comment I made in Tuesday’s post, “The mutter of all bums.” By sheer happenstance, the origianl op-ed came out within days of a Russian police assault on a Moscow theater that had been taken over by Chechen rebels. Over a hundred people died from exposure to the supposedly non-lethal chemical weapon injected by the police. I forget the name of the chemical, but it was indeed one of the main subjects of the Penn State study. Most (but not all) would probably have lived had they been given proper, immediate medical attention.

The P.R. flunky for this program did respond to my attack with an op-ed of his own. However, the only charge he denied was that this research was inappropriate for a public university. He didn’t specifically address whether or not it violates the Chemical Weapons Convention. I think it’s a pretty sure bet that one topic we will not hear Bush and Kerry debate in the upcoming months is the United States’ own growing stockpiles of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

The military’s obsessive and incessant use of acronymns and code-words remains a source of fascination for me.

****

I sat staring at my computer screen in disbelief, the address line of my browser keyed to www.mcru.org. My beloved alma mater Penn State is code-named MCRU, “Marine Corps Research University”? That can’t be right!

Surely what they really mean is something like “The Beatrice Q. and James P. Rugglethorpe III Marine Corps Research University.” It just has such a better ring to it.

MCRU was maybe the tenth semi-digestible new acronym I’d encountered in the course of an afternoon of web surfing. With an Iraq war looming, I was checking out some of the more arcane implications of an MRC (Major Regional Conflict), which seems to differ from MOOTW (Military Operations Other Than War) chiefly in the size and number of bombs dropped and missiles lobbed. The largest and toughest chunk of word-salad was still lodged halfway down my throat: JNLWD, the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate.

If an acronym is long and unpronounceable, why use it? For simplicity’s sake, hereafter I’ll refer to the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate by an abbreviation, “Joy.”

Joy is a Pentagon initiative that contracts for research at the ARL (Applied Research Lab) at Penn State/MCRU, and at several other facilities around the country. “Non-lethal weapons” (NLWs), it turns out, is a catch-all category for anything that can be used to hurt, maim or incapacitate without actually killing people. Some weapons are classified as non-lethal because, if used in a certain way, they don’t kill human targets most of the time: rubber-coated bullets when they’re fired at the ground, for instance, or very brief, agonizing bursts of microwave radiation (both subjects of Penn State research).

But what really captured my fancy was the Joy-sponsored research into what one pair of military strategists rhapsodically describe as “neural inhibitors, gastrointestinal convulsives, neuropharmacological agents, calmative agents, and disassociative hallucinogens,” including such familiar drugs as Prozac and Valium; opiates “hundreds of times more potent” than heroin; a drug called Precedex that “increases patients’ reaction to electric shock”; even GBH (“the date rape drug”). Military planners prefer to lump all these chemical NLWs together as “calmatives”.

I’m quoting in part from a 50-page report produced for the Directorate by the College of Medicine and ARL, entitled The Advantages and Limitations of Calmatives for Use as a Non-Lethal Technique. Deploying a potent cocktail of Militarese and Medicalese, the report describes calmatives as “pharmaceutical agents . . . with a profile of producing a calm-like state,” with “physiological and behavioral effects [that] range from amelioration of anxiety, mild sedation, hypnotic effects to coma and death.” Ideally, of course, they would be administered in doses designed to produce merely “a less agitated, groggy, sleepy-like state” or “a stunned state of consciousness.”

Who’d have thought that the theme of Bobby McPherrin’s body slapping, sleepy-like hit of yesteryear, “Don’t worry, be happy,” might one day be enforceable by riot police?

The authors point out that such chemicals “offer specific advantages in a non-lethal warfare setting.” They don’t say exactly what such a setting might involve, though they do allude to situations involving an “agitated population,” exemplified at one point by “a group of hungry refugees . . . excited over the distribution of food,” and at another point they suggest helpfully that certain drugs offer superior “control of an individual.”

Non-lethal warfare? How very politically correct (PC)!

The foreigners and liberals at the Hamburg- and Austin-based Sunshine Project have a serious bee up their butt about this research. They’ve been using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to obtain a number of classified documents (including the report cited above) which, they claim, add up to a pretty damning conclusion: that the US military is in direct violation of international law, specifically the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC).

Not only does the R&D program itself constitute a violation but, they say, Joy is currently flouting CWC rules even further by testing a delivery system: the 81mm M252 mortar, which has a range of 2.5 km., according to recent FOIA-obtained documents. The sunshiners whine about the danger of escalation if “non-lethal” chemical weapons are used in battlefield situations, wring their hands over the possibility of a new chemical arms race, and go so far as to imply that using chemical weapons against Iraq would make us (U.S.) vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy!

The Sunshine Project’s latest bombshell is a press release dated 27 September, maintaining that experiments with human subjects are planned, or may indeed already have been conducted. Their evidence consists of a murkily written contract, dated 29 January 2002, between the Directorate and MCRU.

Actually, this isn’t too hard to believe. Anecdotal evidence suggests that close to half the student population of Penn State/MCRU on any given Friday night descends rapidly into a “stunned state of consciousness.” And was it really just a coincidence that Arts Fest revelers somehow didn’t feel like rioting this year?

The Directorate, for its part, tells the Associated Press (AP) that it has decided to “step back and make sure the use of calmatives would not violate the Chemical Weapons Convention.” Part of “making sure” apparently includes denying the release of over two thirds of the documents requested; ordering the US National Academies of Science not to release unclassified documents deposited in their public archives by Joy; and even by classifying their own internal, legal review–a tacit admission that thoughts themselves can be dangerous.

Which, come to think of it, is almost an inevitable conclusion, if you begin (as the Penn State study does) with the premise that resistance to authority constitutes a treatable psychological disorder.

But apparently they didn’t “make sure” soon enough. Already-released records indicate that back in 2000 our British allies–timid as always!–protested that the calmatives program was illegal. Joy simply replied that it would proceed anyway: “If there are promising technologies that DOD [Department of Defense] is prohibited from pursuing, set up MOA [Memorandum of Agreement] with DOJ [Department of Justice] or DOE [Department of Energy].”

Translation: “Pass the buck and damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!”

Space doesn’t permit more than a mention of some of the ironies surrounding the Joy Directorate’s work. Where to begin? In Afghanistan, where opium production under U.S. occupation has rebounded to pre-Taliban levels? In the Andes, where peasants’ coca crops are destroyed by U.S. taxpayer-subsidized military aircraft indiscriminately spraying deadly chemicals?

How about in Happy Valley, where a moralizing university president has encouraged police to crack down on underage drinkers, and where students are suspended or expelled for possession of a quarter bag of pot?

On the second week of October, the Sunshine Project presented its case at the Chemical Weapons Convention conference at the Hague. Oddly, its suggestion that the UN send a weapons inspection team to the US was greeted with resounding silence. (All I can say is, they better not try flying their black helicopters over Beaver Stadium!)

Hmmm, that’s strange–I feel this sudden, uncontrollable urge to lie down on the couch . . . turn on the television . . . watch football . . .
__________

The text of the Chemical Weapons Convention may be found here or here. Since this essay was published, the ARL has removed most of the offending material from its website, though the most damning documents (including the report I quoted from) are archived here by the Sunshine Project. Access to the MCRU’s website has also been restricted. An example of the military’s thinking about the legal and ethical status of non-lethal weapons may be viewed here.

Housekeeping note

HALOSCAN UPGRADE

I finally sent Haloscan some money, which means that comments can now be as long as a whopping 3000 characters each – and they will be preserved indefinitely! My ability to edit comments is vastly simplified, so let me know via e-mail anytime you want to change something you said (be it as minor as a typo or misspelling). I also get e-mail notification when someone leaves a comment, which is particularly helpful if it’s in response to a post in the archive.

I’m having a problem with early comments not registering. From about the first week of February on back, all comments are incorrectly labeled as “(0)” whether they are there or not. But nothing seems to have been lost, which is the main thing. If anyone knows how to fix this, please let me know. Also, I don’t understand this “trackback” feature too well. Do folks who have it at their own blogs really find it useful? I’m reluctant to add too many features that might confuse people who aren’t regular blogonauts.

The girl in the raincoat

The electric went out this morning just as I was casting about for something to blog about. April fool! We were without power for three hours altogether. It was raining too hard to go for a walk, so I found myself reading in the only chair in the house with enough natural light – the one in front of my computer. Damn, I live in a cave!

When the lights went out I had been reading Jorge Tellier, whose nostalgic poems about his childhood in the rainy South of Chile should have been a perfect accompaniment for such a gloomy day. However, they didn’t seem quite what I wanted, and I had to resist the temptation to pull out a volume of Georg Trakl translations instead.

Nostalgia is such a self-indulgent mood. It’s the daydreamer’s ultimate escape, “the country of nevermore” (el país de nunca jamás), as Tellier calls the landscape of his childhood. It is lost in the way we would like to be lost ourselves, distracted forever in a world made from pure longing. It is not the true heaven of the mystic – which exists in the present moment if it exists at all – but its doppelganger, the Land of Faery, the paradise beyond death. How else to explain the apparent paradox that experiences we were in fact barely present for can assume in nostalgic recollection such portentous and idyllic proportions?

And pondering still Walter Ong’s theories about the transition from orality to literacy, I’m wondering if nostalgia might stem in part from a reaction against the increasing irony, the distancing of consciousness from world that literacy entails? We remember with special clarity those years before full literacy, when bedtime stories and ghost stories had such power to entrance or terrify us. The stories we invented then about ourselves and that others told about us probably still form the most solid substratum of our self-identity.

I’m thinking (with some nostalgia) about a woman I used to work with – one of those rare people gifted with what I can only call a pure heart. (William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, described such people as once-born.) I remember her talking once about her largely unhappy childhood, and how she still pictured herself as the little girl in a raincoat with her back to the camera, poking at the water in a puddle with a stick. Yes, I thought, for all her cheerfulness there was something of that sad little girl, deep down – as if a photo I’d never seen had captured her very soul.

I don’t want to rehash past arguments to the effect that the notion of a single, unitary soul is a recent and minority view. What’s indisputable to me is that this substratum of the self formed in early childhood is inhabited by an uninvited guest, whom we may or may not consider a friend: our own death. (I am trying to avoid the terminology of modern psychology, in which I have little grounding.) Communication with the dead involves us in a very special kind of language, older than human speech: the figurative language of omens, markings, gestures, involuntary actions and reactions quicker than thought. Here’s the title poem from Carolyn Wright’s translation for the University of Texas Press (1993), In Order to Talk with the Dead: Selected Poems of Jorge Tellier. I have altered the last two lines just a bit.

In order to talk with the dead
you have to choose words
that they recognize as easily
as their hands
recognized the fur of their dogs in the dark.
Words clear and calm
as water of the torrent tamed in the wineglass
or chairs the mother puts in order
after the guests have left.
Words that night shelters
as marshes do their ghostly fires.

In order to talk with the dead
you have to know how to wait:
they are fearful
like the first steps of a child.
But if we are patient
one day they will answer us
with a poplar leaf trapped in a broken mirror,
with a flame that suddenly revives in the fireplace,
with a dark return of birds
before the gaze of a girl
who waits on the threshold, motionless.

Para hablar con los muertos
por Jorge Tellier

Para hablar con los muertos
hay que elegir palabras
que ellos reconozcan tan fácilmente
como sus manos
reconocían el pelaje de sus perros en la oscuridad.
Palabras claras y tranquilas
como el agua del torrente domesticada en la copa
o las sillas ordenades por la madre
después que se han ido los invitados.
Palabras que la noche acoja
como a los fuegos fatuos los pantanos.

Para hablar con los muertos
hay que saber esperar:
ellos son miedosos
como los primeros pasos de un niño.
Pero si tenemos paciencia
un día nos responderán
con una hoja de álamo atrapado por un espejo roto,
con una llama de súbito reanimada en la chimenea,
con un regreso oscuro de pájaros
frente a la mirada de una muchacha
que aguarda inmóvil en el umbral.