Creature of the Shade

iceland: northward to mars (part 1 of 3)

The process of making Mars habitable for humans will start with microbes, and later a world-spanning carpet of lichen and moss.  First you’ll need to increase the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to warm up the planet a bit, but then plants should spread rapidly, happily gobbling all that carbon dioxide and turning into carbon, for the plant, and oxygen, for us.   Redwoods and apple trees can come later; for sheer quantity and toughness on volcanic rock, mosses and lichens will do the heavy lifting.

I’d been reading about this, in Kim Stanley Robinson’s scientifically careful novel Red Mars, when we landed in Iceland, and drove out onto the volcanic plains surrounding Keflavik airport.  Add a red filter, and I’d have been in the landscape of the novel: rock, moss, and lichen to the horizon, plus cold, hard wind.

 

 (Was the Viking lander named for the people who first landed in Iceland, with this parallel in mind?  The internets are silent on the question.)

Things move faster on Earth of course.  This lava field is from an eruption in the 1300s.  Some of it came down very smooth, creating flat volcanic plains such as the beachside expanse at Reykjarnes where a statue of an extinct great auk contemplates its former habitat …

(It's an impressively remote site for public art, at the end of this long black-gravel road.)

But sometimes new forces blasted apart older layers of lava, flipping them vertical for a ruins of war effect.

Eventually moss and lichen fully covers the lava, and a while after that, you can grow grass on the flat bits, even as the volcano still steams in the distance via a geothermal plant, and hillsides of moss remind you of an earlier stage of history.  Finally, you get a decently terraformed look:

No trees, though.  At the restaurant that evening, rain on the windows turned a barren ridgeline into a mirage of conifer forest.  Mirages always show you what you're most desperate for.

How would one live here?  How would one build anything here?  

Continued at Part 2.

 

icelandic in two hours

Svartur.  (Icelandic: black)  The color of much of Iceland.

As I understand, the a and u are both long in the German manner.  In English vowels: SFAAAHR-toor.  And the little t is not aspirated: just a cold click on the top of the mouth, no spittle, like switching off a light.

Very fun to say.  I hear the word behind me, in a deep yet female voice, and imagine turning to see a black-haired, white skinned young woman in iridescent dark green standing on a black volcanic plain that rushes away toward black mountains.  (No, not a goth, dudes!  She was there before goths were invented, though the Goths had been ...)  In the distance, a horde of men in black armor on black horses flow over the black plain, only the spears and buckles glittering silver under the moon.  Racing toward us perhaps, but not closing the gap; there is time to say SVAR-tur, SVAR-tur, SVAR-tur many times before they arrive.

The pleasure of starting into any new language is the discovery of sounds.  And as always, you start with approximations, quick hits on how to use your mouth, however trained, to get to a sound that is fun to say.  (Whether it's accurate can wait for another day.)  In the case of Icelandic, what I hear is what German would sound like if Germany were bigger, emptier,  less forested -- more like Iceland, in other words.  Icelandic seems designed to bounce off of far, sheer walls of granite, and return sounding like the voice of a Norse god -- oceanic vowels, sibilants, and trills rolling over each other like clashing armies or lava flows, each phoneme annihilating the last as though it had never been.  

(Except for all the little syllables that just vanish in spoken text, but are still there, confusing me, on the page.)

I've just closed the deal for a visit to Reykjavik, Iceland, around the autumnal equinox.  I will be in rooms talking with people about transit planning, while Zach combs the famously austere countryside for photos.  Obviously I will never speak Icelandic better than the least educated Icelander speaks English by the age of five.  The professional use of learning a bit is mainly to be able to pronounce placenames reasonably well -- an important skill in my biz, where I talk about local geography a lot.  And of course I'll try to learn to say thank you (Takk fyrir!) and a few similar things correctly, the minor lubricants of otherwise English conversations that tell the locals I know where I am. 

The linguist John McWhorter pointed out, as I'm sure many others have, that the languages of conquerors and centralized administrators tend to get stripped of complexity.  This is because people having to learn the language as adults (the conquered, in one sense or another) will outnumber its native speakers, so their simplifications will gradually penetrate the language.  We can all see this happening to English now, but the same thing has happened to all conquering tongues -- Latin, Spanish, Persian, Mandarin, Arabic -- at least in their standard forms.  By contrast, non-conquering languages, especially those with relatively few speakers, can be infinitely complex, opaque and counterintuitive, because almost nobody learns them as adults.  Practically everyone who speaks them learned them as children, and children can learn anything without needing it to make sense.  

I can already feel that about Icelandic as compared, say, to standard German.  I've only been studying it for two hours and the phonics are clearly far more mysterious and subtle.  There's some weird thing going with double-L; in Icelandic it sounds like t.  There's also a terminal nn that sounds a lot like t.  There are places where r sounds like s.  In fact, a lot of Icelandic consonants seem to seize up, turn into dusty clicks and gasps of Beckettian austerity, especially at the ends of words.  Yet I know that each of them is subtly different to the native, and I will have to do my best to get them all straight.

But I'll also say fun words for fun.  And if some tall guy with a deep voice is walking around Reykjavik at night intoning SVAR-tur! SVAR-tur! (black! black!) they'll probably just identify him as another existentialist tourist in search of the true platonic form of darkness.  They must get people like that all the time.

 

customers or slaves?

When Siri (the voice recognition system on Apple's iPhone) learns the command "Show me a Google map of ___," I will believe that corporations want customers instead of slaves. 

I also await, but with little hope, the day when an Apple phone understands the command: "Use Dragon Dictate instead of Apple's wretched dictation software, so that you finally start understanding what I'm saying." 

Siri's refusal to invoke a non-Apple product is called "vertical integration." It's the process by which we are required to use a company's incompetent products in order to use their competent ones. Its purpose is to entrap the customer so as to prevent actual competition from occurring, as competition would require corporations to do actual work, including actual innovation.

Vertical integration is the mechanism by which the vendor-customer relationship is being transformed into a Lord-vassal relationship, as in feudalism. Like a vassal I must choose my Lord, Apple or Android, and then be utterly loyal to Him in both his good and his evil moods.

The other mechanism for abolishing the customer is the merger of companies in the same business, where stamping out customer choice is quite explicitly the whole point.  

Abolishing customer choice, and thus abolishing the need to actually innovate, is the real purpose of the modern corporation. If customers were free to choose, corporations would have to work harder, and there would be more innovation. But we can't have that.

Discuss.

washington dc, 19 january 2013

Now and then I encounter an old piece of writing that seems ready to go ...

Washington DC, a brilliant, surprisingly warm winter day, the day before the president's second inauguration.  I'm walking from Georgetown toward Dupont Circle, holding the bottle of water that I'd bought when I'd noticed myself dehydrating.  As always, it was a purchase tinged with resentment.  I missed the gentle four-armed drinking fountains of tap water of home, whose absence had forced me to fund, yet again, the great bottled-water scam.

I pause on the bridge over Rock Creek, step aside into one of those pedestrian alcove spaces that certain old bridges have around their pillars, set the water bottle down to gaze into the cold creek.

I hear "… the American middle class.  In fact, the American middle class is so feeble that they can't even walk down the street without a bottle of water."  … then a mumble as he passed and then again, as they walked on … "the American middle class (grumble) (lecture) …"  I saw his face briefly as he went by, with a nodding companion who was the audience of his lecture.  Short, intense, forties probably, striding fast, his anger as natural as breathing.  

After that, the bottled water, and the view of Rock Creek, tasted ever so slightly better ... 

 

meditation in hell

The publisher's ruse worked perfectly.  

A few minutes from boarding for a long flight, my laptop battery is dead, so I'll need a book.  There's something called a New York Times Bookstore, which sells souvenirs and snacks and phone chargers and $200 headphones and is studded with televisions on which Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu declares to the US Congress, in tones worthy of Moses, that all negotiation is appeasement.  ("It's a loop," the clerk explains.)

But they do have a few books, mostly those dreaded bestseller piles.

It's a common moment in my frequent-flyer life.  The usual recourse is to seek a new-to-me book by a familiar name.  There it is: between management gurus and Fifty Shades sequels, a book by Peter Matthiessen, celebrated travel writer, novelist, Zen practitioner, and by all accounts a beautiful human being, who passed away last year.  It's called In Paradise.

Airports are made of impatience, so I want to know what I'm getting.  Front cover: a railroad track dividing into three and vanishing into blue haze.  "Poetic and scarifying," says the Washington Post on the cover, which tells me nothing.  I flip to the back cover for the usual two paragraphs of semi-informative summary, only to be fixed in the author's gaze: Damon Winter's stunning photo of the elderly Matthiessen, filling the whole cover. He looks right at me as the great spiritual teachers often do: compassionate in our shared awareness that I have nowhere to hide.

No plot summary anywhere on the book.  So I open the book to a random page and see the word "Auschwitz."

And here I think:  I do not want to spend a four-hour flight at Auschwitz, but no worries.  One of the world's greatest and wisest voyagers, Mathiessen might drop into Auschwitz somewhere in a book.  But he wouldn't write a whole book set in Auschwitz.   I trust Mathiessen on this.  In an airport second, as Netanyahu's baritone scatters the appeasers back to their dark holes, I actually think these things.  

I buy the book, settle on the plane.  In Paradise is about a meditation retreat at Auschwitz. Except for a few scenes in Cracow at the beginning and end, we are all trapped there together. At my pace the book takes four hours, and explodes them into eternities.

Whence the title?

Christ crucified is importuned by a penitent thief, in agony on his own cross on that barren hillside.  "I beseech you, Jesus, take me with you this day to Paradise!"  In traditional gospels, Jesus responds, "Thou shalt be with me this day in Paradise," but in older texts -- Eastern Orthodox or the Apocrypha, perhaps? -- Christ shakes his head in pity, saying, "No, friend, we are in Paradise right now." (132)

Twenty or so people have gathered at Auschwitz for a week in mid-winter, 51 years after the camp's liberation.  (How few plots there are!  This is the setup of countless mystery stories, comedies, and reality TV shows: a bunch of contrasting strangers stranded together in the creaking, storm-wracked hilltop mansion, or a tropical island.)  There are five or six real characters, all unforgettable: a young German man whose life is consumed by his nation's guilt, a young Catholic novice just beginning to learn about the Church's role, a brittle but kindly female professor from Israel, an easy-going soft-voiced retreat leader who seems fresh off the plane from Esalen, and a mysterious angry knot of a man, Earwig, who is rude to everyone and yet is never thrown out.  There's also a protagonist, of course.

The other participants are little herds of nationality, lurching together.  There's a clutch of middle aged middle class Germans over here.  Over there is a chorus of Israeli Jews studded with the requisite Palestinian, and over here are "the Poles," who seem to do everything in unison, though most of what we see them do is sit with their arms crossed, saying nothing.  

Lodging in rooms where the SS once slept, eating simple meals reminiscent of what was served to the doomed, these people's days will be filled with tours, meditation sittings, and "bearing witness."

Meditation is the death of narrative, so we see it only from the outside: circles of figures cloaked against the cold, first in the main hall, then on the train platform, then in the half-ruined crematorium.  The witnessing scenes, by contrast, are the abyss over which the the novel swings, lowering us slowly.  With his charges seated in a circle, the Zen leader allows each to speak.  He facilitates but does not suppress, calm as the trapped scream of their guilt or rage, lacerating one another.  And in this space, all of it is true.

There is a plot: a protagonist, a love interest, an oppressive authority, an uncovering of truth, characters broken and others remade.  But as the characters themselves keep noting, plot is an artifice here, if not an obscenity.  I found myself irritated as the journey of the Catholic novice Catherine, discovering her church's role in this place, went flat as she became a love interest, fleeing a masculine gaze.  But all the plots go flat here.  The book seems ready to devour itself.

No, I didn't want to spend four hours at Auschwitz, nor did any of these characters really want to spend a week, but they did and so did I, aware that even to breathe in this place, let alone form thoughts and feelings about it, can be called wrong, puny, disrespectful, pathetic.  It can even be called appeasement, I think, imagining Netanyahu's stone-disapproving gaze.

I certainly didn't want someone as credible as Matthiessen to end his fifty-year career with the idea that tribalism is not something from which civilization will emerge, but rather the barest reality of what human beings are.

All this screaming and wailing, you call this a meditation retreat?  But the end of meditation is not serenity.  The end is truth, and the truth is that this is Paradise.

Sam Harris's Waking Up: An atheist's guide to the limits of "atheism"

Sam Harris’s Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality without Religion presents itself as a guide to meditation for the skeptical atheist, one that can separate the practice and insights of meditation from the quasi-religious claims that often accompany how it is taught in the west.  The book builds on Harris’s intellectual atheism (laid out in more detail in The End of Faith) and integrates it with his years of experience with meditation, including intensive retreats of many months duration.  Anyone seeking spiritual clarity from an atheist or agonistic starting point will find it a beautiful and challenging read.

On my second pass through, Waking Up, I've finally come to enjoy it as an intellectual thriller:  How far can an atheist go in describing the immense and permanent mystery of consciousness while still defending the rigid markers of his atheism -- notably his insistence on disparaging the category (never well defined) of "New Age"?

 

darwin: thunder and wine

From my visit to Darwin in March 2014 ...

In other cities, you gather on the beach for fireworks.  In Darwin, you do it for lightning.  But where’s the proscenium or safety rail, to say nothing of the insurance?  Who separates spectator from show when the show is not just out there on the Timor Sea but also right over our heads? 

Still, like bears at the zoo, this storm seems trained not to kill the spectators.   It poured warm rain earlier in the evening, and now, through a brilliant sunset and into the night, is just doing the lightning part.  The bolts are horizontal above us, vertical only when blasting the sea.  Well-behaved lightning, but will a white metal railing do for a fourth wall, lawn this side, beach beyond?  Will a row of tables do, like these at which I sit, with fish and chips mined for protein but otherwise abandoned beside me?   Everyone else lined up at the tables here, grouped about white wine bottles in tabletop coolers, an Australia of confidence and leisure, seems to think so.   

Thunderstorms give Darwin its drama and shape.  Without them, it’s flatly hot and humid, or later, flatly hot and dry.   People who love to be outside are out at night, when it's the slightest bit cooler and at least the sunburn risk is gone.  I’ve never seen so many people in a city’s parks at 5 AM, or midnight.  

The screaming trees are an evening thing.  Around sundown, many hundreds of rainbow lorikeets gather in one massive tree downtown, their chatter so deafening that nobody tries to talk nearby.  Thickly white-spattered pavement beneath confirms that this is the tree, the one where it happens every night.  It’s a tropical thing; the same species in temperate climes is also social but never in such astonishing numbers.  What can be more important than whatever has brought this vast assembly together?

Other wildlife?  Black flying foxes are here, squirrels with wings, gliding and squeaking their way through crepuscular commutes, but not in the great volcanic masses such as once harried Sydney’s botanic gardens.  There’s a white social parrot called the Little Corella, one of several Australian birds with a permanently disapproving expression.  Spotted one stunning azure kingfisher flitting among mangroves.

And of course, there are crocodiles.  One could emerge from the water, ocean or estuary, at any moment, especially for something bite-sized.  (Stinging box jellyfish are another reason to stay completely out of saltwater during the wet season.)  Aussies like their crocs zooed, caged, poked, and prodded from a safe distance.  Most of the country’s microzoos have one, and here there are several big parks with plenty of attention to this largest of reptiles.  There, you can watch them being fed, gaze into their porcelain jaws, hold their cute babies, feel spooked by their open-mouthed taxidermic stillness, and be lectured in shrill feminine monotones about not standing in the water while fishing. 

“Look there, that’s the female, with just her eyes sticking out of the water, looking just like a bit of wood.  She doesn’t even need to stick out that far to see what's going on above the water.  You see, you have to watch out because crocodiles are intelligent.  They will size up whether they’re big enough to eat you.  They’ll go for your leg, but if you offer them something more bite-sized, like a child, they’ll go for that.”  

We titter on cue.  Crocs do nibble around the edges of Darwin, as cougars do around Los Angeles.  There are periodic tabloid-fueled debates about somehow getting rid of them, but it’s pointless of course.  These hot, buzzing mangroved estuaries – red mud, gray air, and greenish-black water -- are co-evolved with them.   Everything selects reptilian patience over mammalian anxiety. 

Darwin is a surprisingly highrise city, soaring hotels and apartment towers crowding the downtown peninsula, shoving each other to catch the views.  It’s less clear where so many residents work, except that this is a natural resource town – mining, natural gas, etc – and that means vast corporations that can buy 100 units in Darwin just to have for whenever they’re needed.  It was impossible to believe that everyone was at home: not nearly enough traffic or pedestrian life for that. 

The towers have that sudden-colonist look, that just-landed-from-space look, as though they may have crushed something interesting when they fell but the debris has been tidied up.   One short street, advertised in an old guidebook as a site of an interesting bar and restaurant, is nothing but sterile towers now.  One is even called the Envy, as though Deadly Sinners only need apply.

People are nice but a bit distant, as is common in outposts of exiles, prospectors and tourists.  As I talked with local planners about public transit everyone asked me if it was reasonable to ask people to walk to the bus in Darwin.  My answer is the same as when I’m speaking in Edmonton in mid-winter:  “it’s amazing what human beings adapt to, though they always complain first.”  Here, though, I’m paused by the seas of white faces that are almost almost all exiles from the cooler southern cities.  They’ve gone up here for a few years’ adventure maybe, proud of a certain resistance to full adaptation.  The aboriginals are adapted, of course, as are all the recent immigrants from the similar climates of south and southeast Asia.  But none were in the room in any meeting I attended, and even white people who had grown up here talked about the climate as though it were something alien, confronting, “character-building” to use the common Aussie term.

But when I went for a rain-run in the mangroves and scrub of Charles Darwin National Park,  I was quite comfortable.  Perhaps Darwinites should just spend the wet season in swimwear.  It’s just a warm shower, washing off sweat as you go.   

 

 

valparaíso: what i remember

In response the fires that have just swept through the unplanned hill-districts of Valparaíso, Chile, here is an old essay of mine on this magnificent city, from a visit in December 2003.  

After two hours of freeway through scrubbish, hot plains, the bus from Santiago seems almost to plunge off a cliff, dropping 600m of altitude on a steep, curvy road that finally runs down a narrow canyon to emerge, bang, in the city. I catch quick glimpses of the celebrated hillsides, but soon the bus deposits me at the roiling central terminal on Avenida Manuel Montt, a raging, asphyxiating, deafening gash that would fit most stereotypes of "Third World Prosperity."

Looming above it is the Arch, or rather El Congreso, an overpowering Modernist 20-storey slab with a great square hole in the center. Surrounded by high fences and guarded by the ever-stern Chilean police, it is utterly wrong for its site. The prosperity of storefronts declines noticeably as you approach it. 

I know the Arch is wrong even before I know of its fascist provenance. But indeed, this monstrous cube is the last architectural gasp of the dictator Augusto Pinochet, perhaps the last of his many atrocities. Pinochet conceived this imposing box/monument/prison for an irrelevant Congress that he wanted to get out of Santiago so that he could dictate in peace. Today, the talk is all of abandoning this building, though it is hard to imagine how it could be re-used except as a monument to the horrors of the Pinochet regime. Perhaps it has enough rooms that one could be devoted to each of the 3000 or so people who "disappeared" under his rule. 

Fortunately, I can look away. Though I´m still not sure where the ocean is, I can see beyond The Arch to the thickly warrened slopes of countless hills. Homes, shops, parks, cemeteries and churches cling to these hills on all sides, somehow glued to even the steepest slopes. And as they have done for a century, doddering funiculars dot the hillside, their tracks suggesting numerous ladders carelessly left lying about. 

The old funiculars should be as much of a tourist attraction as San Francisco´s cable cars, and are certainly more useful. The cabins that climb and descend these steep tracks are lovingly maintained inside, and the small terminal stations, too, look like the real Victorian thing. The tracks aren´t exactly parallel anymore, but somehow they get you there; as with the making of sausage, you'll enjoy the product more if you don't ask too many questions about how it's done. 

Though the Arch casts a heavy shadow, city life is lively once you are a block or two away, and once you get into the hills you will rarely see it. The Arch is in the "new center" of town, where the highway from Santiago comes out, but the old center, sited for convenience to the port, is 20 blocks to the south, and a far more inviting place to start a visit. 

The working port consumes most of the waterfront, so you'll have to go to neighboring Viña del Mar if you want a beach. The narrow flat area between hills and beach is packed with overcrowded, polluted streets, since these are the only way in and out of the hills. But it is in the hills that Valparaíso sings. This is a city for views, from hill to ocean, from one hill to the next. And it is city of details: children adapting their ball games to the narrow, steep, curving streets; facades ranging from lovingly restored Victorians to boxes of corrugated steel; narrow stairways that are the only access to many homes. 

Now and then a visitor compares Valparaíso to San Francisco, a revealing comparison for how much it leaves out, and for the questions it raises. I would compare it more to any of several Italian hill towns, though the sheer scale of this city-in-the-hills is larger than any European city can offer. Still, like San Francisco, one would expect this place to be not just awash in tourists, but also to have a very high cost of living. Surely plenty of Chileans would want to live here, especially compared to the vast smoggy metropolis of Santiago just up the hill. 

Not so. This is one of the poorest cities in Chile. Its role as a port remains, but it´s been eclipsed by newer, more efficient ports on other parts of the long coast. One might expect that, like San Francisco or the harbour-face of Sydney, Valparaíso would give up on being a port and open its arms to industries that would value the beauty of the place, such as tourism and retirement. It might even grow its own healthy commercial center in the process. But none of this has happened yet. The port still hobbles along, largely blocking the city´s access the Pacific, so that one must go to the ends of the city to find a beach or even a pleasant walk near the water. 

The poverty itself is no barrier to tourism. Poverty here is not in-your-face in the way that it can be in some Santiago suburbs, mainly because all the classes in Valparaíso are jumbled together: that polished Victorian may be literally holding up the corrugated-steel shack next to it (or perhaps vice versa). The "separation of classes" that Americans are used to at home is unknown in Valparaíso, and this, of course, is part of what makes it a real city. 

If you enjoy seeing great cities that have not yet been overrun by tourism, and you don´t mind the grittiness of cities that are actually lived in, you´ll love Valparaíso. Like the ideal lover, this city doesn´t really know how beautiful it is. Its manifest inefficiencies, blockages, and Pinochetista wounds can all help you imagine that you are the first to discover it, and that nobody has seen the city as you do. 

Well, nobody but some local poets, such as Pablo Neruda. But who listens to poets? The Chilean tourism authorities encourage pilgrimages to the various Neruda shrines, including one here, but there´s not much sign that they´ve read him. Certainly they haven´t seen what he saw here, and what is still there for anyone to see.

oasis

Summoned by business to the Emirates, I landed in Dubai and felt done with the tourist-city in half a day:  Photo of window washers on the Burj Khalifa, short walk through a Hindu market, a museum of dioramas of Bedouin life, a four-story fishtank and overpriced breakfast at the Mall.  Dubai invites rushing.  Happily, my business lay in the desert to the south.

At a hotel taxi rank, I said “Al Ain,” and caused an explosion of shouting.  I’m not sure who chose the winner: a well-dressed and slick-haired Arab man in a shiny black car.  En route through the suburbs, we did the “where are you from?”  “Syria,” he said.  The pall.  Family is all still there, his brother is missing but his mother sees him alive in her dreams.  As we blasted across the open desert at 150 kph, the corner of my eye noted the corner of his: clear exhaustion and sometimes wells of tears.

“Excuse me, aren’t you speeding?”

“No.  Is OK.  See there, speed limit is 120.  You go 20 over.  Everyone does.” 

Nobody did.  Cars fell away from us like discarded booster rockets.  His dashboard flashed when he went over 140, but that seemed to encourage him.

I breathed.

Arabia is deep desert: dunes and rocks so barren that Arizona and central Australia are rainforests by comparison.   Orange near the coast, gradually redder inland.  This is what I could photograph behind a gas station on the freeway as a meter ticked, but in the distance, there were few plants, and finally none.

In the distance, here and there, mesas: the desert rose to a flat area entirely covered with something: a grand building, a lavish compound, a grove of date palms.  

But at 150 kph, that was all over fast.

A city of half a million, Al Ain sits straight south of Dubai on a series of oases along the Omani border.  It’s mostly flat but sliced by low barren ridges that spread from Jebel Hafeet, a soaring orange ridge to the south.  A natural crossroads and watering place, humans have settled here for at least 5000 years, while nomadic Bedouin have come and gone for centuries. 

(Andrew Sullivan's blog used this photo for their "View from your Window" contest.  Nobody guessed it exactly, though it was entertaining to watch them struggle.)

As in most of the Emirates, there are plenty of Westerners working here, and plenty of South Asian “guest workers.”  International tourists, though, mostly give it a pass.   

It’s a conservative town, and while the public works are lavish as anywhere in this wealthy country, it’s all for an Arab and Islamic gaze.   The peak tourist season is for Emirati visitors, and it happens in summer, when this always-warm town is at its hottest, because the coastal cities are too humid then.

No building can be higher than the grand mosque, so the city has built to about five stories in a narrow range of shapes, most quoting the proportions and styles of Islamic architecture.  Every buiding contains an element of mosque.  

But ultimately, everything is here is because of the oases, the rare abundance of water that comes up in several spots around the city. 

Downtown grew on the edge of the largest of them, as a city might grow on a river, but the oasis itself was always protected.  It’s about a kilometer long and maybe half that wide.  Not a park.  An intensive farm, mostly of dates. 

Like so many things here, it’s walled.  A private people, Emiratis enclose to protect.  The effect is often brutal, but here the demarcation is beautiful. 

As often in such places, I first found my way in through the back, an unmarked but open door, leading into what I later realized was one farmer’s plot.   The irrigation channel was the only path. 

The irrigation method is called falaj in Arabic, but it’s probably not much different from what desert peoples have invented in several parts of the world.  Springs within the oasis are carefully channeled to take water to every small plot, where leaseholders maintain date palms and the occasional tropical fruit tree. 

The trickling serenity is intense.

Fallen dates encrusted my shoes, but also spared me the need to carry water.  They were delicious.  Now and then I saw one impaled on a spike, like an hors d’ouevre.

Only much later did I emerge onto one of the grand walks.     

 At the center of the oasis, as at the center of everything, is a mosque:

An infidel, I pause for mosques, notice with curiosity, but stay back.  As a visitor, I like these moments when I'm exiled from the local's space, here and open but different.  So I move on, watch, and listen ...

Let's end here, where Al Ain began millennia ago, in the miracle of water.

consider, with dawkins, the fig

Portland

Just finished reading Richard Dawkins's book Climbing Mount Improbable, whose task is to defend evolution from the accusation that certain features of organisms could not possibly have achieved their brilliant design through a continuous series of viable steps, as evolution requires. He tackles several of the hardest cases.  The hardest of all may be the eye, which he argues really was possible as a very long series of minor adjustments to the basic idea of a light-sensitive cell.

But the reason to buy the book is the last chapter, in which he confronts the distressing topic of What Goes On Inside of Figs.  To wildly simplify, fig (Ficus) flowers are inside of the figs.  Each fig species has a corresponding species of wasp that hatches in one fig and, if female, lives to transport pollen to a different fig, lay her eggs there, and die.  But again, that's like saying that Hamlet is about a guy who's mad at his father-in-law; it's the endless infoldings and recursions and self-references that make the fig-wasp story enthralling and distressing in a way that invites comparison to the literary.

I've tried to explain the fig-wasp mutualism many times, and never have felt I'd grasped it.  Dawkins goes all the way through it in a way that both explains it and acknowledges how astonishing it is, and while much of the book is beside the point for non-creationists, this chapter is worth the price of the book.

A fig is not a fruit but a flower garden turned inside out.  It looks like a fruit.  It tastes like a fruit.  It occupies a fruit-shaped niche in our mental menus and in the deep structures recognized by anthropologists.  Yet it is not a fruit; it is an enclosed garden and one of the wonders of the world.  I am not going to leave this statement dangling as a self-indulgent profundity to be plucked by the 'sensitive' and baffle everyone else.  Here is what it means.

Those last two sentences are classic Dawkins, consciously engaging in "self-indulgent profundity" only to cut off any mythmaking that this might encourage.  Dawkins sometimes sounds like he's training his reader in awe management.  Feel the amazement, he says, then accept that plausible explanation for it all.  Learn to feel awe without needing to make myths.  Other writers, like Stephen Jay Gould, are better than Dawkins at allowing the awe to survive the explanation of science; Dawkins never avoids seeming a bit of a killjoy.  But what he does he does well, and he explains the astonishing story of figs and wasps -- in its several tiers of infolding complexity, very well.  After laying out the many cross-cutting layers of motivation and sabotage in the fig-wasp drama, he concludes:

Figs and fig wasps occupy the high ground of evolutionary achievement ... Their relationship is almost ludicriously tortuous and subtle.  It cries out for interpretation in the language of deliberate, conscious, Machiavellian calculation.  Yet it is achieved ... without brain power or intelligence of any kind.  The players are a tiny wasp with a very tiny brain ... and a tree with no brain at all ... It is all the product of an unconscious Darwinian fine tuning, whose intricate perfection we should not believe if it were not before our eyes. 

... and which, once grasped, changes our relationship to figs.  To me as an American child, figs meant fig newtons, and sometimes squishy seedy fresh figs, and now and then a houseplant that seemed always to be dropping leaves.  But since getting close to the diversity of figs in Australia, I've learned to feel toward the genus Ficus something that's amounts to admiration, curiosity, horror, and revulsion in roughly equal measures.  

A few months ago, when last in an Australian grocery store, I considered buying a fresh fig, but then looked closely at the hole in the bottom of each fruit, which can bear a distinct resemblence to an anus.  It's not that busy a hole: only female wasps pass through it, and only on entry does its abrasions strip off their wings.  But it's enough to remind me that a fertilized fig would be full of dead wasps, wasp guano, crushed waspy ambitions, and indeed everything else that would accumulate, as karma or compost, in a flower garden.

Not only that, it would have been the site of dramas of Shakespearean subtlety, not the less dramatic because the competing desires lay in the genes of the players rather than their consciousness.  It doesn't matter that this fig I might buy is sterile; it's still a stage set for the same overwrought opera.  It's just rather a lot to just put in your mouth, and chew on.