Hiking with Jane
My sister Jane has been visiting, and we’ve gone on four killer hikes this week. Yesterday we hiked to Naomi Peak, to my mind the most stunning hike in the area. Some pics:
along the trail
Jane at the peak
... with me and Sammy, the bound-around hound
view from the summit
Marriott’s The Lost Tribe
I just finished this account of a journalist’s encounter with a “lost tribe” in New Guinea, that is, a group of people who had not encountered Europeans prior to 1993.
The book is riveting, almost despite itself. Marriott strikes me as naive, foolish, and often obtuse, but, boy, can he write a story. He decides to march into a thick, deadly jungle, led by some local guides, in search of some barbaric people who are known to be cannibals in order to ask them how things are going. He encounters several drunken, disillusioned westerners along the way, who all chastise him for calling the tribe “lost” out of some bizarrely misplaced concern for political correctness. The New Guinea infrastructure appears pretty much nonexistent, certainly once you leave what passes for a city. If you break an ankle in a New Guinea rainforest, you may as well just lay down and die, or wait for the cannibals to come; no life flight will be on its way. (I know, this is an overly snobbish take on my part; I don’t deal well with societies in which I cannot find a good martini. Utah is a even a bit of a stretch for me.)
As Marriott and his guides tramp, slip, and slide their way through the heart of darkness, they come across a little pig, which the guides gleefully strangle, pack up in leaves, and later toss into a fire so that they can break apart its flesh and bones and savor the fat little strips of undercooked meat in their black teeth, grease dripping into their beards. It’s that kind of place.
They encounter the lost tribe, and guess what? They are destitute and barbaric. But this is what I found most fascinating of all. The tribe is only partly accessible, culturally and emotionally. Meaning: by Marriott’s account, you can’t safely trust any of your assumptions about what people will do or how to interact with them. It’s bewildering and disorienting. In one scene, Marriott is talking with the village men who are psyching themselves up for a hunt (more little piggies), and these guys, who had been somewhat friendly, are now starting to get scary. They brag about their cannibalistic past and start taking on fierce attitudes. Marriott starts to back away, and rightly so: there really is no telling what’s about to happen. The guys are hovering in a kind of waking dream state, where whims are not likely to be overriden by any rational or emotional commitments. Indeed, that’s the whole lost tribe for you — a group of people in a strange, impressionistic swirl of superstitions and quasi-knowledge, fed by raw emotions and desires. You can see why some people ended up calling such native people “childlike,” since children have a similar kind of impetuousness, but this is an impetuousness coupled with very violent adult passions and adapted to a harsh environment.
The first Westerner to encounter these folks gave them a smattering of gifts and appointed one of them as being in charge. This, despite the fact that there already was a chief. Marriott now finds the chief totally disoriented and aloof. He has no sense of his own place, and wanders the village silent and alone. There is also a strange man living among the tribe and trying to impart Christianity to them. He’s self-important and stupid and cruel, though Marriott finds some empathy for him and his bleak situation.
Just before Marriott and his guides are about to leave there is a terrible thunderstorm. Everyone huddles in the makeshift houses as lightning pounds down around them. One house is struck, and five women and children are killed. Marriott and his guides know they had better get out of town fast before the hunters return, since they will surely be blamed for the accident, and certainly killed. So they flee, but in their escape they encounter the tribe’s hunting party, led by a man Marriott has befriended, whose wife and children have just been killed. What do you do? Break the news to your friend that his wife and daughters have been fried by lightning? No, because if you do he and his buddies will kill you and eat you. So you lie, congratulate them on their hunt, shake hands, and off you go. You simply can’t count on reason and heartfelt emotion to carry the day.
Marriott ends up feeling guilty, as if he did indeed bring harm to the tribe. But that’s nonsense. And so far as I can see, there is no “indictment of colonialism and its lingering legacy of cultural annihilation,” as the book jacket suggests. The lost tribe, having had a taste of civilization, wants an airstrip and a hospital and a gold mine to be brought to them. But, bloody hell, they can all march out of that godforsaken place anytime they want, and make use of what little civilized amenities New Guinea has to offer. And I can’t see that anything beautiful would have been lost: these people are living at the margin of existence, shutting up women into huts and trading them for pigs and watching their children die of malaria. Nothing noble about the savagery here.
I know: spoken like a true cultural imperialist. I can’t help but feel that some forms of life are better than others, and the one ridden with superstition, malaria, and cannibalism is pretty low in the rankings.
Woody Allen’s philosophy
resonates with me. Here is an excerpt from an article (Konigsberg = Allen):
Konigsberg states that his reading of philosophy and literature is mainly an attempt to help him answer the ultimate question about life: its purpose and values in its relation to death. “I think the most important issues to me are what one’s values in life should be—the existence of God, death—that’s real interesting to me. Whether it’s capitalist society or socialism—that’s superficial.”The task Konigsberg takes on is no small one for a comedian, let alone a philosopher! Konigsberg puts the problem into the voice of his character Allen when he says, “My view of reality is that it has always been a grim place to be . . . but it’s the only place you can get Chinese food.” Variations on this theme appear throughout his writings: “Not only is there no God, but try getting a plumber on weekends.” Or, “Eternal nothingness is O.K. if you’re dressed for it.”
In somewhat less of a punch-line voice he rues, “I think the salient feature about human existence is man’s inhumanity to man.” He reiterates the point:
What I’m really saying—and it’s not hidden or esoteric, it’s just clear as a bell—is that we have to accept that the universe is godless and life is meaningless, often a terrible and brutal experience with no hope, and that love relationships are very, very hard, and that we still need to find a way to not only cope but lead a decent and moral life.
In this sense, he’s Kierkegaardian without the leap of faith, or Sartrean without the existential ethics of action. But Konigsberg does ask, “How do we carry on, or even, why should we choose to carry on?” His answer—specifically to a Jesuit priest-philosopher at St. Johns University who wrote an essay on Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), describing the movie as the most atheistic film ever made—is notable:
To me it’s a damn shame that the universe doesn’t have any God or meaning, and yet only when you can accept that can you then go on to lead what these people call a Christian life—that is, a decent, moral life. You can only lead it if you acknowledge what you’re up against to begin with and shuck off all the fairy tales that lead you to make choices in life that you’re making not really for moral reasons but for taking down a big score in the afterlife.
Read the whole thing here.
More Oregon pics
We had a great time visiting the Oregon coast and Portland with family. Some more snapshots:
The whole gang on a swinging bridge at Oswald West State Park
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'Smores gelato on HRH's birthday
On the road in Oregon
Multnomah Falls
Two cave creatures
Cousin Erik does push-ups with some added weight
“24″ does more than “reflect” government policy….
… it shapes it. Check out this Newsweek piece by Dahlia Lithwick about 24’s influence on those who design and sit in judgment of the US’s torture practices. An excerpt:
According to British lawyer and writer Sands, Jack Bauer—played by Kiefer Sutherland—was an inspiration at early “brainstorming meetings” of military officials at Guantánamo in September 2002. Diane Beaver, the staff judge advocate general who gave legal approval to 18 controversial interrogation techniques including waterboarding, sexual humiliation and terrorizing prisoners with dogs, told Sands that Bauer “gave people lots of ideas.” Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security chief, gushed in a panel discussion on “24″ organized by the Heritage Foundation that the show”reflects real life.”
Handey vs. Heidegger
Check out the contest over at cliché reality. And while you’re at it, read how Handey wants to be remembered in this New Yorker piece.
An excerpt:
No one is really sure how old Jack was, but some think he may have been born as long ago as the twentieth century. He passed away after a long, courageous battle with honky-tonkin’ and alley-cattin’.
New meaning to moronic comic strip
I just love it when someone unlocks the secret to find meaning in an otherwise moronic comic strip. Like Nietzsche Family Circus, Garfield minus Garfield brings an existential dimension to idiocy. In this case, the effect is achieved by simply removing the damn cat, and everything he says, from the strip. (Thanks to nephew Matt for the link.) An example:
No country for old men
Finally saw the film last night; I read the book months ago. No one equals Cormac McCarthy in portraying a pitiless, random, violent universe, occupied by pitiless, random, violent human beings. The film is great, and captures the novel perfectly. In one respect it’s better: Chigurh’s speeches aren’t as long and preachy. The best line of the film comes near the end, when Chigurh commands his next victim to call a coin toss; her life depends on it. She says, “The coin doesn’t decide; you decide.” And he says: “The coin and I got here the same way.”
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