Tag: postmoderism

What We Can’t Know

Mark Davis2 Comments

I’ve been wandering in cities, unlocking the secrets of metros, funiculars, tipping expectations, museums, and ride-sharing services in languages that, despite several years of study, I know will never reveal the finer brocades and stitches of cultural subtleties reserved for the natives. The gestalt that lingers over Portugal and now Barcelona (Malta soon enough) is of palimpsests in crush and stone, accumulated over the centuries in a barely-controlled layering. There is an incompleteness to the spaces where boarded facades in gothic quarter alleyways carry neat signs promising renovations beside “Free Palestine” graffiti arcing imperfectly above the work of an artist with a careful touch. Banksy has imitators and challengers. I blended into a crowd this morning surrounding and cheering a socialist politician demanding support for “pensionistes” due to some meticulous failure of the current regime.

Maybe.

There is all this that I can’t know with any precision. Foggy barriers of time, space, language, culture, and even pulsing jet lag keep me from having the instant recognitions of motives and the occasional capacity to irony and winking humor that I drift along with in American culture.

I travel very light these days (“Eu sou minimalista” as I constructed and then confirmed via Google Translate) with just a 16 liter sling bag. Three shirts, three underwear, three pair socks, one pair pants…Everything in merino wool except the pants, which are in capable technical materials. I have a charger bag and a small toiletries kit. I have my phone and an iPad Pro with keyboard. I do laundry in my bathroom sink every other day or so, rolling clothes in my bath towel and then hanging to dry overnight.

And on those devices I just finished Ian McEwan’s newest novel, What We Can Know, read on planes and trains, at cafe tables, and in the crepuscular uncertainty before I am forced into the night for dinner.… Read the rest

Marshlands

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MarshlandsIt is purely by chance that I discovered a remarkable note, penciled in a deliberate cursive, on page one hundred something of a secondhand copy of Borges’ Labyrinths. The Huns were clashing about and trampling books, but one survived—that sort of chance or magical thing—and an arrow crawled up from the text and declared “all great civilizations are built on marshes,” seemingly in praise for the despoiled monastery and its now collapsed civilization, or perhaps referring to the banks of the Danube or the arc of historiography that passed from Athens to Rome later in the page.

Regardless of the minutiae of the referents, the statement remained in my head for days as I shuffled about through my ordinary occupation and preoccupations with information theory, intelligent machines, and some spectral analysis of the statistical distribution of gut bacteria/eukaryotes. Google was fragmentary in its responses to the phrase as a query and I quit before the end of the first page, anyway, distracted by other thoughts about why marshes would be so attractive for building a civilization. The fishing should be good, admittedly, as well as the availability of reeds for various structures, but the shifting nature of land and the threat of mosquito infestation struck me as negatives. And wouldn’t clean, fresh water be better served by a mountain stream? All great cultures should be at the base of a non-volcanic snowpacked mountain.

I returned to Borges later in the week and found myself fanning through the pages like a schoolboy watching a stickfigure animation until, seventy-five pages further, below the tail of an essay on Cervantes and the inversion of authors and characters and readers, there was another brief flash off a curlicue of lead embedded in the page.… Read the rest