Each year on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, I set aside some time to read through one of his speeches.

Yes, read. Not listen or watch, but read.

True, Dr. King was more of a speechmaker than a pamphleteer. The audio and video recordings of his speeches are indeed powerful.

But it’s kind of like that moment when you think of a song you’ve loved for years, and realize you have no idea what it’s about, or maybe just an incomplete understanding.

The non-verbal elements that inspire and attract us to a well-delivered speech can distract us from the actual message.

Strip away the soaring tone, the cheer of the crowd, the scratchy black-and-white sense of historical import, the measured breath and gleam in the eyes, the hands resting on each side of the podium as the voice rises and falls, and what’s left?

The words.

Quietly reading the text of a speech removes many of those sensual elements that allow us to get swept away in the moment.

It also fills out the frame in a way that all the short clips and soundbites we hear so often never do: not just the heights at the end, but the slow, steady climb through the rhetorical switchbacks before we glimpse the summit.

Here’s an excerpt of an excerpt that I posted last year:

Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood — it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, “Too late.”

Hard not to think of pre-earthquake Haiti when reading a quote like that.

This year, I chose “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution“, from which this line also reminded me of Haiti — and North Korea and Zimbabwe and Detroit and so many other places:

“There is nothing new about poverty. What is new is that we now have the techniques and the resources to get rid of poverty. The real question is whether we have the will.”

And this is the passage that’s stuck with me throughout the day:

One day a newsman came to me and said, “Dr. King, don’t you think you’re going to have to stop, now, opposing the war and move more in line with the administration’s policy? As I understand it, it has hurt the budget of your organization, and people who once respected you have lost respect for you. Don’t you feel that you’ve really got to change your position?” I looked at him and I had to say, “Sir, I’m sorry you don’t know me. I’m not a consensus leader. I do not determine what is right and wrong by looking at the budget of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. I’ve not taken a sort of Gallup Poll of the majority opinion.” Ultimately a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus, but a molder of consensus.

On some positions, cowardice asks the question, is it expedient? And then expedience comes along and asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? Conscience asks the question, is it right?

There comes a time when one must take the position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must do it because conscience tells him it is right.

Hmm.

Cowardice, Expediency, Politics and Vanity as the four horseman of Inaction, with Conscience as the savior?

I could sign on to that worldview.

The King Institute has a list of Dr. King’s speeches, with transcriptions of most.

Is it too early? It’s barely been a year and a half.

I am currently, shall we say, gathering data in Terra incognita.

Rather than rush to publish a few posts that aren’t quite ready, I thought I’d take the chance to highlight a few from the past seventeen months or so.

Writing a blog feels a lot like practicing a musical instrument with the door open.

You try to focus on the sound and the music, while imagining people wandering by muttering:  “Isn’t he getting better at that yet?” Or “He’s still making that mistake?”

Blogging is a process of learning and thinking in public.  After nearly a year and a half, I’m more proud of some posts than others.

Here are a few of the posts that hint at ideas I’ll be building on in the coming year:

• In June, I drew inspiration from the sky: The Benefits of Having Your Head in the Clouds
• In May, I wrote about traveling with all your senses
• Also in May: Peculiarity over Productivity
• That was part of a series I did in May about having too many ideas: Creative Surplus — Season 1
• Six months after the financial crisis became obvious, I thought about different ways we can and do experience wealth
• In February, I questioned the defense mechanisms we sometimes use to protect ourselves from the sophomore curse.
• And in January of this year, I used a pre-recorded music ‘scandal’ to defend faking it: Frozen Fingers, Fumbled Phrases

Presentation

The subject reports “a multi-directional effusiveness, an avaricious over-seeking of meta-meaning, and an at-times overwhelming sense of the abundance of interconnectedness of ideas, in which each thought lurks in the shadows of another’s metaphor, and springs forth when approached, hoping to find its place within the whole.”

Diminished ability to punctuate and form distinct sentences and pararaphs is also suggested.

Diagnosis

The subject is experiencing a periodic flare-up of chronic Editor’s Block, loosely defined as a mind-numbing inability to agree with oneself on a final draft, or even an intermediate one.

Treatments Recommended

1. Eat an unknown variety of apple.
2. Feel a light drizzle on one’s face.
3. Run one’s fingertips across the branch of a rosemary bush and inhale deeply every five or ten minutes until only the memory of scent remains. (Or until the hands are washed — it is flu season.)
4. Listen carefully to the crunch of leaves underfoot.
5. Look away from the computer screen, and wordlessly observe scenes like this one:

More compelling than a thesaurus -- sometimes

Prognosis

The subject will return in a few days to report on the efficacy of the suggested treatments.

The tonic effects of time should not be discounted in this case.

People seem to be tilting their heads a little higher on the streets lately.

(No, not just because of the latest gushing story about Portland in the national press.)

Our trees — the moody ones that change their wardrobe with the seasons, not the stalwart evergreens — are baring themselves for winter, and Portlanders, often with cameras or camera phones in hand, are gathering evidence of autumn before it all falls away and leaves us with short days and drizzle.

This season brings all sorts of sensations: the first time in months when you feel cold even with two jackets on, the pumpkin lattes, the smell of roasting squash, the constant uncertainty over whether it is or isn’t actually raining, the seemingly endless variety of fresh apples, the piles of leaves that the kid in me wants to stomp through, and the intuition to look up a little more frequently than usual.

Life doesn’t stop, of course, and all the things that preoccupied us two weeks ago, and will preoccupy us two weeks from now, are still there, weighing on our minds enough to even our gaze, or turn it back down to the ground.

Looking down: Not such a bad view, either...

Whether absorbed in conversation, mentally re-prioritizing my reading list (again) or simply walking around mulling over nascent thoughts, whenever I see someone fussing with a camera, it acts as a silent, subtle alarm: something interesting must be happening here.

Hmm, a building — must be working for a real estate agent.

Or we see a toddler stumbling down the sidewalk towards the parent, who is documenting another step towards confidence.

Then there are those rare — and to me, beautiful — moments when a quick scan reveals no cause for photography at all. We can find no explanation for why someone has stopped to capture some part of this scene.  And we are left to wonder:  How often am I missing something among all that seems ordinary?

A camera is an attention-directing device as well as an image capture device. To point a camera is to convey to all those around us: I find this worth remembering.

When passing a woman carefully framing a shot causes us to pause, and wonder what she’s looking at, she has done us a great favor by making us more attentive to our surroundings.

Even just seeing a photo later, out of its original context, on Flickr or a postcard or an email, can have a similar effect. We think:

“I saw something like that last week, and I didn’t stop to notice the details.  Maybe I should.”

And with that in mind, I’m going for another walk, before all the leaves are on the ground.

Last night, while cutting and roasting these little squares and cubes of yum:

Not quite squares or cubes...

I was listening to an episode of Philosophy Talk about language titled “What Are Words Worth?” and one of the topics was whether and how our native language constrains our thought processes.

Most people would consider English to be my primary language. Anyone who has tried to comprehend my attempts at French or Japanese or Chinese would consider English my only language. And they’d be essentially correct.

Or is it mostly accurate?  Or spot on? I have a notion of what each of those phrases means, but I’m not sure the best way to say it. I could keep fiddling with it, or come back to it in ten minutes. But I’ll just leave it as an example of my frequent inability to find a word or phrase that precisely fits what I’m thinking.

If my thoughts originate in English, shouldn’t the words and sentences just fall out of my head, fully-formed? Why do I feel inclined to hunt through dictionaries, ponder each word’s heritage, and fret about shared perceptions of what specific words mean?

In other words, why does writing feel like translation rather than transcription?

Micro-Dialects

Maybe it’s a matter of converting my own personal and idiosyncratic dialect into more commonly used patterns? That seems plausible enough.

We each use language in our own peculiar way. Through editing and revision, we move from the quirky, hyper-local dialect of our internal monologues towards the language practices we share with our audience.

To communicate a specific idea, I have to capture its meaning, seal it into these little semantic packets called words and phrases, sequence those into sentences and paragraphs, encode it with one computer, transmit it to another computer, and let you take it from there.

As a reader, you go through an inverse process: you use a tool like a browser to copy it from a computer to your computer, which retrieves text from the numerical codes, and positions the sentences and paragraphs, which you then parse into words and phrases. Hopefully they mean something to you which approximates what they meant to me.

This model works well enough for blog posts, which tend to focus on words and voice, so it’s easy to assume that only the machines are translating and transmuting the ideas as they move from my mind to yours.

An Inadequate Container

But what about all the ideas that never take the form of written or spoken languages?

Could anyone imagine Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring captured in words alone, and then accurately transformed into sound? It might be possible — after all, musical notation is a kind of language — but it would certainly be inefficient and absurd.

I could have described the objects depicted at the top of this post using only language:

“Two well-scrubbed sweet potatoes from the Farmers’ market (cut in 1.5cm cubes) along with a red pepper from the Farmers’ market (cut in 2cm squares) tossed in olive oil, cumin, coriander, black pepper, a pinch of salt, roasted in a glass dish at 400F for approximately 53 minutes, until they were just right.”

Yet there’s nothing intrinsically linguistic about them. I used language to procure them. I just used language to describe them.

Other than that, the experience of them, it seems to me, has very little to do with language. I decided a photo paired with a flippant phrase (“little squares and cubes of yum”) was a better way to present them. Smell and taste would create a more accurate perception in your mind of what came out of the oven, but digital media hasn’t quite caught up with those senses — yet.

If language is not an adequate container for all thoughts, then what is thought?

Do ideas form out of a kind of raw “thought stuff” which is then sometimes translated into language?

In my experience, yes, which is why I feel like writing is translation, like whatever I express in English is at best an approximation of what I’m after.

I’ll explore this question, and some of its implications for idea-making, in my next post.

In the meantime, I’d like to hear about your experiences:

• Do you feel like you are directly transcribing what’s in your head when writing a short story or a blog post or painting or dancing?
• Or do you feel like you are translating your ideas, whether into language or image or sound or other physical forms?

Please add a comment or send an email or a tweet, and let me know.

The Black Book of Colors by Menena Cottin and Rosana Faría is the shortest book I’ve read in quite a while.

This concept book consists of a series of paired black pages: text describing a color in both braille and white letters on the left page, and an image in raised black ink on the right. (You can see an example in this review.)

Ostensibly a book for children, it is a book meant to be touched and felt. Sighted readers can tilt the book back and forth in the light to perceive the image — but that’s cheating isn’t it?

Thomas, our guide through this seemingly monochromatic world, explains each color to us:

“Thomas says that blue is the color of the sky when kites are flying and the sun is beating hot on his head.”

Touching the adjacent page with eyes closed, I scanned from upper left to upper right, out of instinct.  There didn’t seem to be anything at all.

Descending the left side of the page, my fingertips caught a bare thread near the bottom. With no other distractions, they followed that thin line up and to the right, until it exploded into the shape and form of a kite.

Our eyes can take in a page at a glance — not every detail, of course, but the general structure of it.  With touch alone, our sensory connection to the page shrinks to narrow points — a fingertip or two. The experience of the page happens not in an instant, but through time.

Looking at a page, we think: there’s a kite on the right.

Touching the page, there’s nothing at first, then a spare line, and then a burst of complexity.

It’s not just that we’re using a different sense: the entire sequence of the experience has changed.

Questions

What is your primary sense?  How do your perceptions change if you mask or ignore that particular sense and focus on your other senses?

Does your primary sense allow you to perceive something in an instant, or does the experience unfold through time? Do some senses take longer than others?

With practice, could your perception with that particular sense get faster? Would you want it to?

Could your perception with that sense get slower over time? Would you want to develop that ability?

For many modern-day visitors to Egypt, Abu Simbel is an out-of-the-way excursion, an option at the end of the itinerary. Down near the border with Sudan, and much smaller than most of the high-traffic historical sites in Egypt, it is an afterthought.

Just another postcard:

Abu Simbel Postcard

But what if it is approached from the south, as humans have approached it for millennia? Or as part of a 14,000 km walk across the continent?

“Alexandre and Sonia Poussin undertake to walk the length of Africa entirely on foot, from the Cape of Good Hope to the Sea of Galilee. In a three-year trek along the Great Rift Valley of East Africa, their goal is to symbolically retrace the passage of early Man, from Australopithecus to Modern Man.”

After spending three weeks making their way through the deserts of northern Sudan towards Egypt, Alexandre said Abu Simbel seemed “huge and egoistic”, like an announcement that you’ve reached the beginning of civilization.

Clambering up a fallen facade

So which is it? Just another set of statues at the end of the postcard deck?

Or a still-standing Ozymandias?

The order of our experiences, the precise sequence of where we’ve been and what we’ve observed, profoundly shapes our perceptions of our surroundings in the present moment.

When I heard Alexandre describe Abu Simbel that way last fall, it reminded me of a walk I had taken through the woods in Virginia several years earlier.

I was visiting Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home outside Charlottesville. After buying a ticket next to the parking lot, visitors have a choice: take a bus up to the house, or walk up a gently sloping path. I took one look at the crowded line for the bus, and headed for the forest.

As I walked, I looked at the trees, the trail, the changing October leaves, and wondered how it all might have changed since Jefferson — or Sally Hemings, for that matter — walked nearby two centuries ago.

More poignantly, when approaching Monticello from the forest you pass the graveyard first, well before the house is in sight. Jefferson’s gravestone provides a concise outline of how he viewed the accomplishments of his own life:

Gravestone of Thomas Jefferson (Sorry for the bad photo...)

I continued walking past the main lawn and the gardens, and rounded the front of the house to join the line for the tour. I listened to the chatter of those who had taken the bus to the top as they debated how long Jefferson had been president, and when, or which denominations of money featured his face.

Within the house at Monticello, the tour guides focused on Jefferson’s massive library, his incessant architectural tinkering, the specimens  Lewis And Clark sent him from their expedition, his prodigious correspondence, his wine collection, his agricultural experimentation, his massive debts, and, of course, his eight years as president.

I listened and absorbed all the historical details with my usual level of curiosity, but also through a more reflective frame: Before starting the tour, I had already seen how it ended, from Jefferson’s perspective.

Questions

Have you had the chance to approach an historic site or a work of art from multiple directions?  How was each approach different?

Do particular pieces of art imply a certain approach?  How is the work strengthened or weakened by arriving from another direction?

Think about the way paths are constructed in museums.  What can you glimpse from the outside? From the lobby?  From one gallery to the next?

Where does the ‘art experience’ start? How have the museum’s designers managed the transition from street to art? How does the sound environment change? The temperature? The lighting?

How would it be different if you came up an elevator from a parking garage instead of through the front entrance?

Exercise

Find a place or work of art that can be approached by multiple paths, and take each.

Experience the same place or idea coming from these distinct perspectives, and make note of the differences.

A path could be a physical approach — the way you move towards something.

Or it could be a contextual approach: go to a gallery or a museum exhibit that you don’t know anything about. Note the experience. Then go study the historical and cultural context, and return.

Or it could be imagining a new path to a place you’ve already visited: Did the existing path enhance or detract from your experience of that place? If you were asked to redesign the approach, how would you do so?  What elements would you preserve and what would you change? What mindset would you try to create for visitors?

In the northern hemisphere, the summer travel season is upon us. In addition to thinking about sight-seeing and noshing over the next few months, I want to encourage you to go here-hearing, place-touching and site-smelling.

That may sound a bit glib and silly, not only because of the wordplay and alliteration, but because it isn’t how we typically think of travel.

When people return from a voyage, they talk about the places they went, the people they met and the conversations they had. In terms of making sense memories, they may have lots of photos and videos, and tales of food and drink, from the fantastic to the horrific and everything in between.

Sound, touch and smell are often minor characters in the story. Maybe they took note of the smell of a particular flower, or the roar of a waterfall.

But did they touch anything they couldn’t have touched locally?  Did they hear anything they’d never heard of before? Was there a smell they hadn’t encountered anywhere else?

Like a Small, Insistent Earthquake

About ten years ago, I booked a ferry from Stockholm to Turku, Finland. I was expecting a modest little boat for the overnight journey, and was astonished to arrive at the port and see what was essentially a cruise ship looming a dozen stories above the water.

As we boarded, I noticed many of my fellow passengers with folded-up carts and large empty bags were all rushing in the same direction. Curious, I followed the clamor, careful not to get trampled. So much for Scandinavian reserve.

After several twists and turns, I rounded a corner, and ran into a store teeming with activity: Ah. Booze. Now it made sense.

I remembered reading somewhere that the ferries were popular day-trips or night-trips for those buying duty-free alcohol, because the taxes on both sides of the Baltic were so high.

As I turned to leave, the engines engaged, pushing the ferry away from the dock. The massive ship shuddered at the force required to overcome its inertia, and all the bottles began to clink softly against each other.

I entered the store and tiptoed as quietly as I could through the aisles, listening to the highs and lows of the bottles delicately tinkling amid the din of alcohol purchases. Imagine being in a wine shop or liquor store during a mild but continuous earthquake, with thousands of glass bottles barely touching one another.

It lasted several minutes, and it remains one of the most beautiful sounds I’ve ever heard.

Nose and Skin

To retrieve scent memories, I have to think a little more deeply. Here are two examples:

• The aroma of olive oil extraction that fills the countryside in Andalucía, Spain in mid-winter.
• The incense-infused wood in the Todaiji temple in Nara. I went there at least a dozen times while living in Japan, and every time, in every season, I was captivated as soon as I stepped over the threshold.

I really had to scratch my head to come up with a touch memory — I guess I need to pay closer attention to storing tactile sensations in the future! Here’s one:

I used to climb the hill behind the apartment building where I lived on the edge of the sprawl surrounding Osaka, Japan. The hill faced the west, and much of the trail was in the sun, but there was one little pocket about halfway to the top that didn’t seem to get any sun at any time of day. There was nothing visually distinct about this part of the trail, but the quality of the air was entirely different: fresh and dramatically cooler.

I always looked forward to that spot, especially in the heat of July and August. Better than any air-conditioning!

Exercise

Before your next trip, get a pocket notebook. Divide it into three sections, however you like: Sound, Smell and Touch.

Even if you don’t have any travel plans, try doing this exercise on walks around your neighborhood or even the clothing aisles of a local mall. Seek remarkable sensations all around you, even in seemingly unremarkable places.

Every time you take a photo, sip a drink or munch a snack, make a point of entering something in each of these sense categories in your notebook.

Try to get in the habit of reaching for this notebook when you smell something or touch something interesting, in the same habitual way you might reach for your camera.

Describe the sensations in anyway you like: just tune in and capture it in some way.

(I’m a big fan of traveling with audio recorders, but for the purposes of this exercise, I want to encourage you to be in the moment, so please listen with your ears, not your microphone!)

And when you return, give your memories of these sensations top billing in the stories you tell: “You won’t believe what I touched this summer…”

Enjoy!

In the mid-nineties, I was hearing a lot of buzz about the way CD-Roms and multimedia were going to “change everything”. (There’s a pair of words that should always be interpreted as a warning…)

I was working in computer art at the time, and I should have been excited by these developments, but I just couldn’t get into it. In my experience, these CDs were limited to trite little sound-effects, pixelated graphics and postage-stamp-sized video — when they actually worked. Remember what it was like to get video to play on a computer in 1994?

It was tiny. It was puny. It was so much smaller than the scope of our senses.

Was this really the future?

Then I saw Laurie Anderson on her Bright Red tour, and it was precisely the kind of rebuttal I had been yearning for.

Enormity: to be within, and to be enveloped. That’s what this new notion of “multimedia” lacked, and what the concert hall could still provide.

Simulacrum

A gorgeous photo of lightning is not the same as the visceral experience of being in — and underneath — a thunderstorm on a summer afternoon in Alabama.

Seeing a film of people walking around a Richard Serra sculpture is not the same as standing in the shadow of one.

No photo or map conveys the cultural shock of the Reconquista as well as circumnavigating the cathedral built in the center of the Great Mosque of Córdoba.

Going there matters. Being there matters. But it’s not enough.

A Canyon

I have been enjoying Chris Guillebeau’s blog lately, yet I was a bit horrified to come across the Grand Canyon on the over-rated list in his post 9 Overrated Tourist Destinations (And 9 Great Alternatives).

Don’t get me wrong: this is a great article, largely because of the evenhandedness of suggesting alternatives for each overrated spot. His essay/manifesto 279 Days to Overnight Success is also full of excellent insights. The title alone is such a succinct blend of aspiration, pragmatism and volition.

Here’s how he described his experience:

I went there with my family last year, and my 16-year old sister and I had fun coming up with alternative names for the Grand Canyon. Our top choices were:
The Decent Canyon
The Not-Bad Canyon
The “If you’re 10 miles away, go and see it” Canyon

You get the idea. Technically speaking, the Grand Canyon is impressive, but there’s so much hype about it that it’s hard to live up to your expectations upon arrival.

So many people reacted to this that Chris recently added a comment to the post calling for a kind of truce on the subject:

1) I think we’ve discussed the Grand Canyon enough – some people love it, some don’t, and as for me I’m kind of in between. Each opinion is valid, but let’s move on.

Rather than jump into the fray, I want to use it as an example of how we experience enormity.

You can’t really see the Grand Canyon. No human can.

Instead, you go to selected viewpoints, gather information, and try to piece this phenomena together in your head. From this thin dossier, you try to interpret its meaning and significance.

Put another way, a human visiting the Grand Canyon is like a gnat visiting your ankle. Would you say the gnat understands you or your significance?

Such expansive sites and moments are sensually humbling because they surpass the limits of our perceptive abilities.

From any one vista, or by visiting a dozen in a single day, you are merely assembling clues about the nature of what is in front of you.

These clues help you construct a not-entirely-accurate mental model of a physical place, and that is ultimately where you visit places like the Grand Canyon: not in front of you, or beneath your feet, but in your mind.

When we finally arrive at a site we’ve imagined visiting, each sensation is compared to our expectations and the models we bring with us. We confirm some suspicions, invalidate others, and add unexpected nuance.

To truly perceive, we must leave our expectations behind. Otherwise, it’s all comparison.

Big art, Little artifacts

No matter how you go or where you stand, you won’t be able to fly through a place like the Grand Canyon and switch perspectives like you can in Google Earth. No matter how many times you visit, you’ll never capture each vista at the precise light conditions found in the 100 highest-rated photos of it on Flickr.

Do such tools and services take the magic away? Do they give us such a rich set of expectations and such a strong sense of having been there that real life — the sight and sound and smell of any particular spot — just can’t compare?

When technology delivers fragments and artifacts of sensory experience to our desks and kitchen tables and mobile phones, what does it mean to go somewhere anymore?

It’s worth noting that many of the commenters who disagreed about the Grand Canyon had immersed themselves in the Canyon by hiking into it or rafting through it.

Immersion seems to make a difference.

And that was the problem with the multimedia hype in the 1990s: we were trying to connect with big ideas by looking through the jaggy and unreliable window of a computer monitor and hearing tinny sound from little speakers, with no other senses engaged. We were outside, looking and listening in. It was too small for us to be enveloped.

Yes, computers have gotten better and faster and better able to convey beauty.

But a 24-inch screen and a great speaker system still offer mere hints and fragments of what the world is like.

Here is an image of a painting by Salvador Dalí:

The Hallucinogenic Toreador by Salvador Dalí

You may have seen it before.  Did you know that it is four meters tall — taller than one person standing on the shoulders of another? Approximately 25-times the size it appears on your screen?

When we go to enormous places and encounter big art, we all have our own distinct experiences. When surrounded by something bigger than any one of us can perceive and comprehend, we notice different things, and we come back with different stories.

The collection of all of our stories continually reshapes the myths, and the myths reshape our perceptions.

The only way to judge the hype and keep the myth connected to the reality is to go there, and let the sensory richness of a place or an idea infuse your mind and body.

You still have to go there.

I was traveling through Europe during the financial crisis of 1998. While it was not the kind of crisis that was obvious on the streets of western Europe, there were stories here and there of how the froth of the markets — especially the currency markets — had spilled into every day life.

In Helsinki, I met a German motorcyclist who was making plans to return home by ferry.  He’d made it through Poland, the Baltics and Russia, but with great difficulty: he couldn’t get any hard currency out of the banks at all during the last half of his trip, though everyone wanted to hand him rubles — as many as he could take.  But no one would accept rubles from him, a non-Russian.  Dollars, they told him.  Deutsche marks.  British pounds.  You’re a foreigner, went the implied argument.  You must have some real money.

He did, back in Germany. But the numbers in that account didn’t matter to a local bank in Latvia.  They had no dollars or Deutsche marks to give. No one was willing to translate those distant numbers into a fungible, functional currency, though they were eager to give him all the local paper he could carry.

He told me of the relief he felt crossing into Finland, inserting his bank card into a machine, and watching it proceed with the transaction, as though nothing unusual was going on. The alchemy of the ATM seemed like a small miracle. The numbers in his account in Germany could be made real again, translated into paper that meant something, no questions asked or explanations needed.

A few weeks later, I was in Paris, and pensive photos of Bill Clinton had pushed the financial crisis to the inside pages of the newspaper.

As I reached the top of one of the towers of the Notre Dame cathedral, my eyes moved upward to look out over the city, and stopped at a newspaper resting on the ledge. It had been carefully folded to the section with stock quotes. Given the climate, I immediately began to imagine some poor soul who had read it one last time, then set it aside before jumping. I hadn’t heard murmurs of anything like that, so maybe this paper’s reader had the sense to set it down and walk away, life intact, regardless of financial status.

I hadn’t followed any details of how the crisis was affecting America at all during my travels. I had limited access to the internet, a very small amount of money invested, and there was just too much to see to be bothered or worried. But curiosity got the better of me. On closer inspection, without even turning the page, I noticed one of the minor tech stocks I owned: it had lost more than half its value since I had landed at Heathrow ten weeks earlier. I shrugged — not because I didn’t care. I shrugged, as my eyes looked out across the city again, because I was in Paris.

I slowly walked back to the youth hostel where I was staying for the week. It was autumn, and I wanted to change into warmer clothes before a night of wandering.

Returning downstairs, I noticed two of my roommates sitting at the bar, in a cloud of smoke and gloom. They were paying 12 francs each for bottles of Kronenbourg beer, and I counted at least six empties on the table in front of them. (This was before paper Euros, and 12 francs was about US$2 at that time.) I walked over for a chat, and before I’d finished my hello, one of them said “We’re so broke, and everything costs.”

This was actually a decent youth hostel, one of the better ones I stayed in during that trip. It was not as though they had been subject to the kind of humiliating delousing described in Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London or were shriveled by hunger with nothing but murky water and days-old bread to eat. They had blown through more francs in beer in one afternoon than I had spent on food and drink in two days. And still they thought themselves poor.

The places we go, the books we read, the films we see, the ideas that excite us, the culture we share, the beauty we perceive, the friends we make, the people we care for, and who care for us — that’s wealth. Some of these require money, and some don’t. But they all add to the richness of life.

Earlier that afternoon, I’d had a late lunch, sitting in the sun, on the tip of the Île de la Cité, as the Seine seemed to flow all around me. I had a loaf of fresh bread, still warm from the oven, that cost me three and a half francs, and a large bottle of Volvic water, which cost me two francs at a small grocery store in a neighborhood I’d meandered through earlier.

Bread and water — the old stereotype of prison food? Not on that day, in this spot:

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I’d had a great day. I’d go so far as to say intoxicating. This couple had spent at least twelve times the amount of money I had spent, getting drunk and bemoaning their poverty, staring at the wall of a dark lobby in the city of lights. Their mindset was costing them more than anything else, because it prevented them from seeing the the beauty and potential all around them.

They asked me to join them at the bar, and I just smiled, politely declined and walked out.  At that moment, it didn’t matter how many francs or centimes were in my pocket, or how many numbers were attached to other numbers in a data center on the other side of the world.

I had a whole city to see, and so many of the best parts were free.

Saint Albray Cheese

I do not know any words in English — or any other language — that could come close to describing the way Saint Albray cheese arrives in the nose.  Aromatic is far too dainty.  Acrid is too derogatory. And pungent isn’t strong enough.

Something emanates from it — almost a physical presence — that fills the nose and then the mouth. On more than one occasion, it has caused me to cough, as if encountering a chemical spill. Through experimentation I found that it becomes more itself if left out of the fridge for an hour or so to warm up. The taste is much more mild than the smell; rich and complex. If you can make it through the shroud of stench that surrounds it, this cheese is exquisite.

At least it is to me.  I’ve tried to share my enthusiasm for it with others, often to their horror. One or two have found it ‘interesting’ while politely declining a second bite, but most have looked at me as though I’ve tried to poison them.  Well, we all have different tastes.

However horrendous this cheese smells, it is still made for some reason or other. Its fans can’t all be stupid or wrong.

And the same goes for all sorts of films and books and works of art. It’s easy to dismiss something that we don’t understand, or that seems repellent on its face. But the simple fact that an idea continues to be part of our culture — that people still make that cheese or sing that song or tell that story — tells us something important about our culture, something we might miss if we go with our initial assumptions.

Questions

What, for you, is the cultural equivalent of Saint Albray? Think of an artist or art work that others respect and appreciate but that has always repelled you for some reason? Can you imagine why other people like it?

Have you judged it unfairly?  Has your judgment caused you to miss important aspects, or avoid certain situations that might have been enjoyable?

Do you feel like you have to rationally justify your aesthetic tastes, or are you comfortable following your intuition where it does and doesn’t lead you?

Have you ever felt intimidated by works of art or experiences that others find profound, but that seem inscrutable to you? Or that don’t affect you in any way?

Exercise

Go see art you don’t expect to like.  Art that’s not your style.

Sit through a film by a director that you can’t stand.  Go to a retrospective for a sculptor that’s always caused you to quicken your pace through that part of the museum.

Pick a well-known creative work or cultural phenomenon that you have dismissed in the past, and re-experience it.  Find at least one redeeming and worthwhile aspect that you didn’t experience on first exposure.

The goal of this exercise is not to change your sense of taste, but to get you out of the comfort zone of your assumed preferences.  You may discover something new, or you may not, just as in any adventure.

This may seem like a perverse way to indulge your dislikes, but there’s always the possibility of discovering the unexpected, glimpsing a nuance you hadn’t perceived before, finding what your well-developed tastes had kept hidden.

Think of it as an opportunity to exercise aesthetic empathy: imagine experiencing art through the minds of others, and pay close attention to what they might see or hear or taste in it that you don’t.

Postscript

In the interest of thoroughness, I attempted relive my own experiences as I was writing this. Unable to find any Saint Albray in the store’s case, I asked the cheesemonger, who informed me that they no longer carried it because they ended up throwing so much of it out — unsold! Quelle horreur!

She suggested Chimay as a substitute. I like their beer, so I thought I’d try it. The verdict: I think the monks should stick to beer.  Their cheese was to Saint Albray as Velveeta is to an aged cheddar, as Silly Putty is to potter’s clay. Bland to the palate, and completely lacking the nasal intoxication that makes Saint Albray so affecting. (But don’t let that bias stop you. Maybe you’d like it, even though I don’t!)

My search continues. In the interim, the myth must suffice.

By the time I read Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel I had already seen most of the fifty United States, visited more than a dozen countries and even lived abroad for a couple years. In all those places, and while moving between them, I had a lot of time to think about how and why I felt this urge to see the world.

The ideas in de Botton’s book gave additional nuance to some of my conclusions, caused me to reconsider others, and to re-imagine the act of travel and motion, of physical and cultural transposition, as an act of creativity — an artistic endeavor.

While his book is ostensibly about travel, there are a number of ideas contained in it that speak directly to living a creative life. Here’s a brief look at three.

Transformation and Return

There is an abrupt and inescapable challenge that is familiar to both mystics and creators: to return from the transcendent to the mundane, while maintaining one’s enthusiasm and clarity of purpose. If we are working deeply in ideas that matter, we will be changed by the experience, yet we must then re-enter a world that is unchanged and indifferent until we figure out how to share that experience.

de Botton reflects on this after returning from a trip:

“It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we are essentially are.”

Or who we aspire to be. The friction of our surroundings can keep us from wild excursions and ill-advised adventures. But it can also constrain our growth, our sense of self, and scuttle our attempts at self-definition and re-invention.

Yawning at the Unthinkable

In 2008, flying is a routine part of life in the developed world. Over the years, there have been many flights during which I’ve buried my head in a magazine or a book before takeoff, and not noticed much else until the plane was on the ground, a time zone or two away.

But de Botton reminds us what we are missing on such flights:

“In the cabin, no one stands up to announce with the requisite emphasis that if we look out the window, we will see that we are flying over a cloud, a matter that would have detained Leonardo and Poussin, Claude and Constable.”

For most of human history, the distance and difficulty of getting a close look at a mountain peak has made it a rare experience, one that had to be earned by great risk and extreme discomfort. Shouldn’t we be be almost embarrassed that today we can glance out a window, look down on a snow-capped peak, and then close our eyes again, begrudging our inability to fall asleep easily?

Wonder doesn’t require mountains or stars on a moonless night, so much as it requires our attention.

The Mind-set of Travel

Our travel experiences depend on both our attitude and the places we visit. Could it be that physical motion is not required to have the experience of travel? Could we bypass the hassles of the road entirely, and still increase the intensity of our lives by applying a traveler’s mentality to our own surroundings?

The most local form of this idea would be to observe our own room as though it was an unfamiliar and unstudied place, as Xavier de Maistre did in his book “Journey around My Bedroom”.

de Botton summarizes one of de Maistre’s insights:

“…the pleasure we derive from a journey may be dependent more on the mind-set we travel with than on the destination we travel to. If only we could apply a travelling mind-set to our own locales, we might find these places becoming no less interesting than, say, the high mountain passes and butterfly-filled jungles of Humboldt’s South America.”

Travel is a way to develop our perceptive skills, and these skills are the best kind of souvenir: they require no extra space in the luggage, and can be put to use daily after we return.

“Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value. A row of shops that I had always known as one large, undifferentiated, reddish block acquired an architectural identity. There were Georgian pillars around one flower shop, and late-Victorian Gothic-style gargoyles on top of the butcher’s. A restaurant became filled with diners rather than shapes. In a glass-fronted office block, people were gesticulating in a boardroom on the first floor as someone drew a pie chart on an overhead projector. Just across the road from the office, a man was pouring out new slabs of concrete for the pavement and carefully shaping their edges. I boarded a bus and, instead of slipping at once into private concerns, tried to connect imaginatively with the other passengers.”

Travel is not only about where we go, but who we might become, and the details we notice along the way.

The enormous turbine hall in what is now the Tate Modern museum in London has been the site of annual large-scale commissions sponsored by Unilever.

In 2002, Anish Kapoor created Marsyas in this space, a massive yet simple piece: a blood red PVC membrane stretched between black rings, one at each end of the hall, and a third above the platform off the north entrance.

Entering the museum from the west, there were few hints of what to expect: the multi-story concrete facade hid almost the entire work, with only the lower edge of one ring visible through the glass doors.

Entering from the west

As soon as I passed through the door, I had to lean backwards to see the top. There was no immediate sense of how far into the distance the piece went. Instinctually, I wondered if I was about to be swallowed.

I walked past the initial ring, then looked back towards the west entrance:

From the floor of the Turbine Hall, looking west

It was an experience beyond words, and inspired an almost-physical sense of awe. A friend of mine, only a little less speechless than myself, summarized: “A man thought that, and then he made it.”

Of course, it was a little more complicated than that, but it is beautifully put: Marsyas was a profound example of the transmutation of a grand idea from thought to form.

Entering from the north, the middle ring hovers just overhead, and light entering at one end can be glimpsed in the center:

Looking up into Marsyas

As the notes point out, it was impossible to see the whole piece from any position.

Sometimes, we can only experience the transcendent in fragments, no matter how quickly we turn our heads or how broadly we perceive our surroundings.

Less than half

Art that arrives in email attachments or short clips on YouTube can inspire us and engage us on an intellectual level. But we still need experiences that envelop us, that are larger than our cell phones or our computer screens or our bodies.

For me, Marsyas was a reminder of how profound it can feel to be overwhelmed — and wordless.

The rest of my photos of Marsyas are on Flickr.

About ten years ago, I had a chance to hear the Tuvan musical group Huun-Huur-Tu perform their extraordinary overtone singing live in London. Between songs, one of the performers explained the nomadic origins of Tuvan musical culture, and asked the audience to listen for the rhythm of trotting horses in the rhythms they were playing.

Every time I’ve heard their music since, even in films that have nothing to do with Tuva or cavalry, I hear those hooves moving along, and half expect a horse to enter from the side of the screen.

The rhythms of our lives infuses our art, our perceptions, and our aesthetics. It changes what we expect to see and hear, the small decisions we make in our own creative work, and, if it is something we encounter regularly enough, I think it even changes what we find beautiful, and what we don’t.

Questions

What are the rhythms in your daily life? How are these environmental patterns shaping your own perceptions, choices and aesthetic attractions?

How often can you hear planes flying overhead or train whistles?

How much time do you spend in transit? How much time do you spend waiting?

How much time do you spend sitting, and how much standing?

How many cups of tea or coffee do you drink each day? Do you notice if that pattern changes?

On a typical day, do you speak with twenty people on the phone for an average of five minutes each? Or three people in person for an hour or so? Or do you spend long periods of time working on your own, with only brief and occasional interactions?

Exercise

Although poetry and drama are the most overt examples, all language has rhythm. In print, in conversation, through radio and television, we marinate each day in the nuances of the language around us. What effect does it have on us?

Sometimes it is easier to enjoy the musicality of language when the meaning of the words is entirely beyond our grasp.

In this exercise, listen to the news in a language you don’t understand.

The BBC World Service has quite a few options. Here are a few suggestions to get you started:

• Albanian
• Bangla
• Burmese
• Hausa
• Somali
• Turkish
• Urdu
• Welsh

Choose a few from this list, and spend several minutes listening to each before drawing any conclusions. Try to listen to each long enough to get ‘acclimated’ to it.

Then explore these questions:

• How does this sound different from your own native language?
• How is the intonation different?
• Do the phrases seem longer or shorter?
• Does it sound faster or slower?
• Can you imagine someone singing your favorite song in this language?
• What kind of music could provide support for this language?