THE VIRTUE OF LYING

THE VIRTUE OF LYING

“Give a man a mask and he’ll tell you the truth.” – Oscar Wilde

Maybe there’s something intrinsically invaluable after all about life having become blindly abstract, of living in a world of pure artifice. Maybe its about an enormous (apocalyptic) transposition of the lie becoming truth. The deeper the lies, the more consequential the truth which awaits us.

So, maybe some reverence should be lent to the proverbial lie. At least it’s worth exploring. In our postmodern dedication to facts and data, it seems that we’re all searching for something at the end of the rainbow, something which information alone cannot offer, since information rarely pursues anything beyond itself. We push it along almost as if to tease something out of it, to prove once and for all that the prescribed world was all bullshit. That it was one huge song & dance (of lies) signifying nothing – unless we pursued it differently.

Perhaps, just maybe, we haven’t teased it enough. Maybe we haven’t taken the lie far enough. Instead of reigning it in like we usually do, maybe we need to go forward with it. Maybe there’s a light at the end of this tunnel.

The artist engages in euphemisms on behalf of this (ig-)noble and timeless institution, but he substitutes words like “fantasy” and “imagination” instead. He’s the one society commissions to indulge the lie “artfully” and without offense. Jose Ortega y Gasset said, “”’Reality’ constantly waylays the artist to prevent his flight. Much cunning is needed to effect the sublime escape.”

No artist fulfilled this commission better than Oscar Wilde – acerbic wit, master contrarian and satirist. He turned facts in on themselves and toyed with them, as well as modernity itself, since the “new era” was mostly about dull and mundane “information glut.” Wilde then committed the ultimate heresy by exposing modernity for what it was not – not the conveyor of what we searched for most. In fact he jump-started his readers’ self-awareness into the future, to some future place where self-discovery was already fully disclosed.

There he said there were no answers and no questions, just the realization of what were real lies and what was the truth – or – toxic lies versus redeeming lies. He saw modernity as a repository for the worst lies of all – endless lies lying about lying. Hence, why not flip tragedy around with comedy? He insisted that what society really wanted was fantasy, active imagination, embellishment, and wild exaggeration as a way out. In other words, a final surrender to “art.” Intuitively we seemed to know that we do not/cannot exist without art. The tragedy is that we keep it peripheral to that other world of mere information (which becomes knowledge, which is mistaken for wisdom).

“Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the arts that have influenced us. To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until he sees its beauty. Then, and only then, does it come into existence.” This was Wilde speaking through his character Vivian in a dialogue with Cyril in a short play). Cyril says to Vivian, “Art expresses the temper of its age, the spirit of its time” to which Vivian replies, “Certainly not. Art never expresses anything but itself…. Art reveals her own perfection.” ^* Vivian then presents the principles of his “new aesthetics,” one of which is that “life imitates art far more than art imitates life…. Life is art’s best, art’s only pupil.”

Vivian preambles his manifesto with, “The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of facts; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.” “[N]ovels … are so like life that no one can possibly believe in their probability…. [It is about] our monstrous worship of facts, art will become sterile and beauty will pass away from the land.” “Facts are not merely finding a footing-place in history, but they are usurping the domain of fancy….”

“Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil, rather than a mirror.” “Life in fact is the mirror, and art the reality.” – This draws a familiar parallel to the ancient Chinese koan: like Zen itself, something beyond the dimensions of good and evil, light and dark, refusing all systems of thought, emphasizing the complete liberty of spirit, what T.S. Eliot called “the inner freedom from practical desire.” Life indeed is about catching up to it and mirroring/becoming it. Like an unexpected betrayal of logic (the domain of rational lies), it short-circuits the mind so it can’t ask anymore questions.

Compare this with the normative standards of information which evaluates art today. The value of a painting for instance is determined by a) how many people bid against each other to get it, and b) “provenance” – that is, who owned it before it went up for auction. Paintings today go for obscene prices (a Rothko for $72 million, a Rubin for $76 million, a Picasso for $106 million), and we have Kate Ganz (a New York art collector) saying, “Suddenly it’s not about the art anymore.”

Author and art critic Robert Hughes echoed the same sentiment, saying there are two ways to “wreck” art: One is to let the market dictate its values to the museum. The other is to convert it into an arena for battles that have to be fought – but fought in the sphere of politics. Only if it resists both can the museum continue with its task of helping us discover great but always partially lost civilization: our own.” – When he and Ms. Ganz speak about “wrecking” art, they’re addressing (perhaps unconsciously) the wrecking of the “pure lie” which cannot be measured or evaluated.

Vivian says, “Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion. They never paint what they see. They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything…. What we have to do… is to retrieve this old art of Lying.” He’s careful to emphasize that there are many kinds of lying (mostly for personal advantage). This is not what he means. “The only form of lying that is absolutely beyond reproach is Lying for its own sake, and the highest development of this is … Lying in art.” He then lays out the other tenets of his “new aesthetics”: a) “art never expresses anything but itself. It has an independent life. It is not necessarily realistic in an age of realism, nor spiritual in an age of faith. So far from being the creation of its time, it is usually in direct opposition to it, and the only history that it preserves for us is the history of its own progress.” (my italics).

By contrast to this, b) “all bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals…. The moment art surrenders its imaginative medium it surrenders everything.” And finally, again, c) “life imitates art.” “{T}he self-conscious aim of Life is to find expression, and art offers it…” He ends by saying, “The final revelation is that Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of art.”

At this level, lying has no purpose or agenda. Whenever it does and fills the world up, it too quickly becomes “facts” (masquerading as truth). Through a daily diet of white lies, half-truths, legal obfuscation, ulterior motives, innocent embellishments, faint praises, secrets, and “factual untruths,” we then begin killing ourselves. We teach our children not to believe anything. To this point, Wilde again: “You get to where you are not by what you believe but by what you don’t believe.”

In his book Lying, Sam Harris writes, “The liar often imagines that he does no harm so long as his lies go undetected.” I submit that, given the manifesto just rendered to us, the opposite is true; that is, when “[facts] go undetected.” What he hides from others is what he thinks is the truth, when it isn’t. And what makes this most tragic is that this confusion is systemic. It’s like whole communities fighting and dying for fools gold (or real gold for that matter), a pet rock, or religion.

The proof of our collective attrition, our desire to give up the fight, is seen in the futilities which end up working against us. As just one small example, take the new institution of “political correctness” – censoring virtually everything so that no one ever gets hurt – i.e., suffering anguish, embarrassment, humiliation – by a “betrayal of meanings.” “PC” protects and preserves the preferred lie to the offensive lie. There is a social contract to be rigidly observed about this, and personal offense can easily occur when one is threatened, harassed, bothered, or irritated by the reminder of what isn’t true.

This is how small and petty a universe of rules (presumed facts) takes us to the brink of insanity as we fight over the wrong problems – verbal offense instead of words and their meanings. We’re immersed in so many “facts” that it ends up causing “undesirable behaviors,” partly because of the pressure of so many rules, but also because we know that the rules are lying to us. Even the “good guys” aren’t telling the truth.

We won’t get into the problems of semiology and signs. Suffice it to say here that the problem of meaning gets down to language itself. Signifiers are mere sounds indicating other sounds (signifieds) – symbols indicating symbols. George Lakoff wrote that “Our ordinary conceptual system in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.” The world is basically “understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.” Everything is a metaphor for something else. Roland Barthes said that “mythology” not only participates in making up the world, “man … is at every turn plunged into a false Nature, it attempts to find again … the profound alienation which this innocence is meant to make one accept.” In other words, everything is mythical (on top of metaphorical). It all forces the question, “Does language unveil anything?” “Does perception unveil anything?” – It’s at this level that the lie encroaches upon the mind unconsciously and thoroughly alters our thinking. And we’re forced to ignore it – that is, lie about it.

The “glut” of information is not just about too much information, it’s about too much lying concealed as truth, which becomes our existential dilemma. It tells us nothing in terms of what we want and need. We end up with, quoting Robert Hughes, “a polity obsessed with therapies and filled with distrust of formal politics; skeptical of authority and prey to superstition; its political language corroded by fake pity and euphemism.” Everything becomes empty and without meaning.

Are facts the same as reasoning? Are they related? No!! Reasoning can garner facts, but that’s all. Reasoning can also lead us to the irrational fantasies and illogical conclusions (even higher intelligence than bargained for). It is merely a tool to entertain whatever one wishes to entertain. Alas, one often conflates the two, since we live in an age that requires high levels of both. And both are retained to guard against the very same “evils” – superstition, unfounded revelations and fantasy. In other words, what logic calls the wrong kind of lying.

Superstition is actually lying with an agenda. But “pure lying” uses reason while avoiding the entrapment of “inviolable” facts. Reason navigates around ideas and imaginings (which can be factual) but that’s all. Facts alone kill the imagination by saying “there is no reason to investigate any further.” And this becomes the new political correctness. It’s static, stale, dull, and kills the spirit of movement. Facts become debilitating and fatal. We’re caught between the toxic lie and an unbelievable fact – and we want out! There is no “purity” allowed in that equation.

We read and study less because we trust facts less. Hence we rely on “personal expression” and “feelings” instead which finally become the only position left to fall back on. But then the PC-Police show up because feelings tell us to take offense when someone disagrees with us. “I feel threatened by your rejection of my views.”

Quoting Robert Hughes again on the “culture of complaint” which is really a complaint about our existential condition: “When feelings and attitudes are the main referents of argument, to attack any position is automatically to insult its holder, or even to assail his or her perceived ‘rights’; every argumentum becomes ad hominem, approaching the condition of harassment, if not quite rape.” – This is the extent to which the distrust of information and questionable knowledge has led us to an almost impossible impasse.

So, again, we return to Oscar Wilde and the supreme Art of lying – the need to liberate it with unbridled abandon and delight. It is not to literally abandon facts and data altogether, which would be stupid. It’s simply to permit more fantasy, imagination, freedom for the absurd, the a-rational notions which offend us most – with greater humor, flexibility, and moral restraint.

The world is all about lying – one enormous cosmic lie – wrapped in what Alan Watts once called the “cosmic giggle.” Don’t take it too seriously, or else you’ll get caught in Herman Hesse’s “glass bead game.” So, it’s best to treat it as such. Then the lies told to us will slowly translate differently – to a theater of masks and pantomime – to be enjoyed and quickly forgotten. Upon leaving the theater it might just dawn on us that there is no ultimate truth anyway, no final theme or plot, just lots of scenes, scripts, and performers.

Now we know the meaning of the old Roman adage, fiat justitia – ruat caelum: “Do justice, and let the skies fall.”

© 2019 Richard Hiatt

*This reminds me of Gibran’s assertion about love: “Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself. Love possesses not nor would it be possessed; For love is sufficient unto love…. Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.”

IT TAKES A VILLAGE

IT TAKES A VILLAGE

Sometimes I wonder if we’ve evolved at all as a civilization. There’s more than enough evidence to suggest otherwise. We seem to conveniently conflate words and meanings, like growth with development and intelligence with technology. The result is always the same. Wherever it is, with whomever it involves, it seems that when society begins at the roots and develops, it invariably ends up corrupt, one-sided, oppressive, and self-destructive. I have yet to learn about a “well-developed” society or civilization on earth that has not become its own worst enemy and executioner.

Ultimately then “progress” becomes a process of “undoing” and returning to what once was. Then we fail in every way imaginable because we try doing it through the filters and lenses which brought us here in the first place. We refuse to give up what we’ve worked so hard to achieve, and that becomes our biggest nemesis. The same dilemma plays itself out in microcosm with each individual – the adult attempting to “recover” his childhood innocence. It’s the old “ontogeny-phylogeny” parallel.

If you want to visit a place which lives by its principles, which practices egalitarianism and justice, you have to go somewhere that isn’t “educated” and technologically advanced. And even then it has to be a village or group that hasn’t yet grown into a city-state. It practically has to be hidden in some forest somewhere , as yet undiscovered, stone-age, and above all very small and primitive.

Just look at the typical history of a village devolving into a modern-day city and nation. It’s not just a process of losing a (spiritual) innocence, it’s also a matter of giving birth to “liberalism” as a counterpart to that (explained below). It’s what happens when politics gets too big for too many people. Liberalism historically is what always symbolizes a silenced majority (wrongfully called a minority), a weaker faction, the side that always gets cheated and betrayed. It’s the eternal realm of martyrdom. Liberals are always behind the curve, always needing to catch up to the other side which always triumphs as controller of the status quo. Just look at today’s Democrats and you’re looking at “the people” as they were five hundred years ago – fighting fruitlessly against wealth and unbridled power which at the end of the day gets away with virtually everything.

So, what does that say about civilization and progress? In another microcosmic way I suppose it’s just another reflection of the “hero’s journey” in classical mythology. One is born innocent but also naive and without consciousness. He must separate from himself in order to return to himself (spiritually) – this time with knowledge and understanding. If we apply that principle to western civilization it becomes obvious that “as a village” we have a long row to hoe. The US is in fact living the “hero” metaphor like no other: Culturally and politically we reside in late childhood-early adolescence (relative to Europe) and hope to survive into late maturity. We hope to rediscover a lost innocence and almost magical simplicity that accompanies wisdom.

Europe and Asia are older than America, and in their minds America is a spoiled impudent child with lots of (dangerous) toys in his yard. The national image of an old man named “Uncle Sam” is a hypocritical lie. It’s why they do more than just envy us. They frequently hate us because they’re forced to fear us. They’d like nothing more than to turn this impudent child over their knee and whack him a few times for his insolence.

Society began “small” in every conceivable way. There was always infighting and conflict, but it always had the community in mind as a whole, never just one piece at the expense of another piece. Human consciousness was literally synonymous with the idea of a commonwealth. It was a large cell consisting of individual cells paradigmatically conjoined. This was “tribalism” at its core, a modern term used by more advanced societies steeped in connotations of inferiority. It’s the term we grapple with daily in a very schizophrenic way – desiring it while fearing it, continuously avoiding it as something “less than.” We repeat the mantra: “It’s quaint, simple, and carefree, but look at all we give up. No way!!”

At first there were the smallest of “kinship” groups and clans. Then clans began mingling, causing divisions of labor and advanced socialization and organization – leaders and followers. Finally there was the city-state of ancient Greece containing many clans and villages. Life became more varied and complex. It allowed for opportunities for the individual; on the other hand it began suppressing the old clan cohesion. There were new social and civic divisions, and the concept of “freedom” came into view on many levels. There were slaves but also free men. Freedom also came attached to civic responsibility – a quid pro quo. Men governed themselves but with voluntary restraint. The individual’s relationship with the city-state was close, direct, and natural, and their interests were bound up together – the authority of conscience was bound up with allegiance to one another.

Hence, one could say the very first sense of community was socialistic. Individual liberty was reconciled with social harmony. All meaningful freedoms required restraints along a path of liberty for all. Social control was necessary for social freedom. One man’s restraint was the condition for everyone’s freedom, etc. This was the first condition of universal freedom. All notions of freedom were grounded as such in the social contract. And of course the opposite applied – the commonwealth allocated appropriate restraints upon itself to maximize personal freedom.

Eventually the city-state grew into the nation-state, and by the Middle Ages there were independent fiefdoms – the Feudal system. Communities had evolved at least in the sense that it no longer had slavery. But at the same time there was indentured servitude; every man had his master: The serf had his lord, who had his seigneur, who had his king. The king bowed to the emperor, who was anointed by the Pope who served the Saints and God (apostolic succession, sacerdotalism). The politics continued to thicken: By now power had become concentrated and centralized, feudal disobedience and disorder were suppressed, and by the late-fifteenth century we had hugely unified states – the foundation of modern nations. There were benefits – art, leisure, courtly love, improvements in the social order, and the suppression of “local” anarchists and feudal renegades. But to operate at all required “regulating” human rights and freedoms – the very things regarded as sacrosanct in early “socialist” clans.

Medieval France was the classic exemplar. Early social groups, called corps, grew into bodies with each claiming special rights. Eventually there were three main Estates – clergy, nobility, and peasantry. The nobles and clergy paid no taxes to the king, while the peasantry did. Certain towns also didn’t pay taxes as they received grants for special exemptions. People of certain professions organized into guilds which could monopolize certain kinds of work and set prices and wages. As kingdoms grew and acquired new provinces, different regions claimed different privileges which included maintaining their own laws and institutions. Non-noble families could “purchase” noble status by buying offices in the bureaucracy – and on and on.

In terms of which Estate (church or nobility) enjoyed the most privileges and tax exemptions, the Catholic Church won hands down. It had its own court system, could collect tithe from peasant farmers, and bishops and abbots lived in great luxury and wealth. All they had to do was feign modesty and humility.

From here we entered the “modern” period. Governments became thoroughly authoritarian, kingly power was supreme which led to arbitrary despotisms. But the irony here was what was happening at the very bottom rung of the social-political ladder. Being the most remotely situated from politics and government, it was the peasant who actually found himself the freest of all. He suffered the most economically, but the simplest freedoms given to him by nature (his natural rights) were core to his family, religion and lifestyle. It was here that “grace through poverty” existed, not in the church.

The peasantry brought on another phenomenon as well. For the first time against authoritarian order we have a “protest” faction weighing in against it. This became the historical beginning of Liberalism – a subversive, illegal, agitator group setting out to resist injustice. Not just another political point of view or ideology, but a “radical” movement willing to use violence if necessary. It’s agenda is not so much to build up as to pull down, to remove obstacles and set people free from bondage. From here on what develops is what today we call “classical liberalism” – as opposed to modern liberalism – the fight for individual freedom and liberty against systemic (government) oppression. And with it comes a long procession of crusaders, martyrs, and champions – Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Hugo, Washington, Paine, Jefferson, Lincoln, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., just to name a few.

The “modern” antithesis to classical liberalism arrived with FDR when corporate power (at the hands of Congress) had become so overwhelming at the cost of so many (who were suffering through the Depression) that he reversed the meaning altogether. We needed more government (labor laws, unions, workers’ rights, guaranteed wages, collective bargaining, anti-trust laws, the GI Bill, Social Security, etc) as a defense against corporate bosses. Liberalism made a 180 degree turn-around. – Needless to say, conservatives today try to confuse their own constituencies by calling our greatest national icons (like Jefferson and Lincoln) “conservatives” because they fought for “minimum government.” This shouldn’t surprise anyone who knows just a little American history..

But here’s the point: There can be no antithesis between liberty and law. There must be laws and restraints to ensure the most freedoms for the individual. The “modern” conservative today resists this tooth-and-nail. He fights for the maximum freedom for himself while disregarding the needs of the collective by killing as many restraints as possible that get in his way. He uses the free-market expedient of “rugged individualism” and “entrepreneurialism” to justify his argument. Even Adam Smith is considered a “liberal” today by his standards, for having the gall to warn against monopolies, to urge some government restraints while the “invisible hand” of shared wealth hopefully worked. Conservatives hate the Father of market capitalism while hiding behind his (redacted) principles at the same time.

So, again, we return to my original point: We’ve gone from true egalitarianism and the commonwealth to an “evolved”(?) state of great division and suffering by the many for the sake of the few. And it’s the “liberal” who is always behind the curve, always “too little, too late” in the face of enormous corruption which always (seems to) win the day. Liberals fool themselves into thinking they’ve “won” whenever a few crumbs fall from the king’s table – a few million dollars here for medical research, a few million there for the homeless. But it’s pocket change to the wealthy who have more money than they literally know what to do with.

A few years ago a famous C&W singer laid this point wide open. Here was a person whose art was/is all about speaking up for the blue-collared “down & out.” One day an interviewer asked him how wealthy he really was. His response: “I have more money than my grandchild’s grandchild could spend in a lifetime.” To a liberal (and a socialist) this was obscene – putting it mildly. The space between his lyrics (rhetoric) and his lifestyle was abominably wide and unforgivable. It just shows the depths of a brazen hypocrisy which consumes us all, exposed most glaringly by our leaders, artists, and celebrities, those we call heroes and role-models. Privately, the so-called champions of humility and modesty live the lives of unbelievable excess. If they gave away just “one-quarter” of their wealth (perish the thought of it phasing their grandchildren’s grandchildren!), it might just retrieve the kind of credibility they wish to keep for themselves and which artists are supposed to defend – as liberals.

So, again, the question stands: Does civilization really evolve? Or does it simply get more convoluted, ensuring that nothing interferes with one’s opportunity to “grab & run” with the spoils of war, community, wealth and power? Has “civil engineering” merely taken on a newer meaning, a newer dimension? It seems to me that the only way for one to regain/rediscover his sanity is to “drop out” and find his own “primitive forest” again, his own clan with which to find a “primitive” mindfulness.

By definition, if you do this, it means you’re no longer a “team player,” and you definitely no longer play by the prescribed rules. You’re feared more than anything. But it’s the great sacrifice, the great stepping-off point, required if we’re going to find what we’re really looking for in this toxic maze of technology, artifice, high speed and volume – a place of “imitations without originals.” quoting Baudrillard.

We’re talking about an enormous “undoing” while moving forward at the same time. All things cycle around, but as a helix. Hence, in no sense would it be a regression. It’s about, to borrow an old hippie phrase, “getting back to the garden” while not actually returning anywhere. The garden is perpetually new. – Never have such innocent words (naively voiced by young pot-smoking minds 50 years ago) taken on such dimension, urgency, and gravity.

© 2019 Richard Hiatt

HEAD IN THE CLOUDS?

HEAD IN THE CLOUDS?

Summertime again, and these months always send me back to my “ADD” days and childhood fantasies. Back then my head was in the clouds most of the time. And today (many say) it never left. What still sends me there are the summer thermals, those cheek-filled gods blowing their sound and fury clear across the horizon. How could the ancients not have seen gods and goddesses playing out their mesalliances on the vault of heaven? To not see a wooden ship, a face, or beast of prey in a large afternoon cumulonimbus was confirmation that one had no imagination at all.

One may need “some” imaginative skills to try and measure the inside of a cloud, relative humidity, or an occluded front. But that’s not imagination in my view, nor is it creative expression. It’s empirical science merely exacting data. If what he dreamed about as a child got preempted by a more rational need for mere measurements, then (in my opinion) something monumental was lost. We do need scientists. But what is a storm cloud if not a Rorschach of the sky, an overture to magical theater, a ringside seat to a toe-to-toe between celestial giants? Clouds are nature’s poetry, smoky semaphore for telling us who we are and where we came from. Nowhere else will anyone ever see proscenium arches and Corinthian columns so majestically stated as frontispieces to ships or prologues to plays.

Happily (and surprisingly) I’ve recently discovered the existence of an actual cloud-watchers group – and its guidebook. It was like an addict finally finding a support group, validation that being “in the clouds” was not a psychological flaw, an act of evasion or avoidance. And even if it was, there was damn good reason for it. I was henceforth no longer “alone” – even if cloud-watching is an exquisitely private occupation.

Little do earthlings (humanoids with their noses “downward”) realize that what’s happening below is happening in the upper stratospheres at the same time. In fact, the above events presage/prefigure/predict events below, before they even appear on terra firma. It would give us a great advantage if we simply paused a few moments in the day to look upwards – not for some simple, all-seeing monotheistic God (which is an evasion), but a pantheon of natural forces assigned with Latin names. As the cloudwatchers say, whether it’s a “cumulus congestus” or the Norse god Thor, one is merely “a Latin version of the other.” ^*

I don’t know if the sky-gods predated the terrene goddesses, but the consensus is that matriarchy “predated” patriarchy. This has always troubled me. There could not have been the feminine without an acute awareness of the masculine, and visa versa. Opposites appear together and perish together. That said, whatever the “official” genesis was, the sky-gods (feminine and masculine) filled the firmament of my childhood. I saw endless processions of ships, trains, birds, bearded old men, bucolic orchards and valleys, and theriomorphs constantly dueling with tridents and lightning bolts.

Before I even knew their names or what they were doing, three- and four-act Greek dramas were supplying me with the stagecraft for my own scripts and casting. The Greeks had their own plot-lines: Zeus duking it out with Ixion over Hera (a cloud gives birth to Centaurus), an over-sexed Jupiter making love to Io (he hides in a cloud to conceal his philandering), Zephyrus, winged “god of spring,” embracing Hyacinthus (jealousy kills the young Spartan and Apolloan, protector of the young, takes pity and turns him into a flower). All this was happening above and nobody told me.

Then there was also Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (the island of Laputa floating above the clouds), and Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s stories of The Old Woman in the Wood, Rapunzel, Hansel & Gretel, and others with their illustrated pages of clouds wrapped around words printed in Gothic typeface.

Meanwhile, the real clouds above miraculously amplified those dramatic scenes as they were read to me by an aunt or grandmother. They would read, and I’d lean back on the grass and “read” the sky’s spectacular triptychs of storm and stress, pomp and ceremony. If there ever truly was a Greek sophist named “Philostratus,” I was his reincarnation.

The size, texture, shape, and color of a cloud told volumes of its personality and mood. And of course its darkness depended on “which side” you stood of that mood on that particular day. Whether you saw anger and lust or benevolence and love depended on your own place in the drama unfolding before you, where your seat was in that day’s celestial theater. It also occurred to me that if you got up and exited the theater (that is, ran from a storm), all you did was encourage the storm god to follow you. And he’d outrun you every time. But if you remained quiet and stationary (“never make eye contact with a wild animal”) he would find you harmless and breeze by you.

All this aside, what I still defer to for stories of wisdom and guidance are found in the mid- to upper-troposphere, where various deities observe us, warn us, and respond to us every day. They not only respond, they forecast on our behalf. They tell us where we’ve been and where we’re going using the semaphore/metaphor of weather. The countless cloud configurations above (sturm) assume their shapes according to the alarums below (drang). There are many sides to human interaction, which means there are just as many cloud types to be read and translated.

That said, there are simply too many cloud-types to name here, with their siblings, cousins, and descendants. So, I’ll pick a few famous ones which most transfixed me in childhood and still do today. This will be very much like choosing my favorite actors from the silver screen days (and film noir). Clouds are like humans – only more so. Unlike humans, clouds accept the fact that they are always in transition of becoming something else (another cloud) – or simply disappearing. Nothing is static. To freeze-frame a cloud and name it is actually a contradiction of nature, something she abhors and resists. Still, for the sake of understanding, we can commit that transgression just for a few moments.

Even romantics like myself must defer to scientific taxonomies now and then, if only to put things in order. We need a system to help us, a kind of family tree. One such system is a classification by altitude. There happen to be “low, middle, and high” clouds in terms of when and where they are born. I’ll pick one or two from each, starting with those who are born nearest the ground.

Let’s start with the most dramatic of all, the most massive, the champion patriarch of every fairy tale, folkloric legend, and myth ever shared around a campfire. The cumulus dons many faces suited to many moods, responsive to many alliances, marriages, divorces, battles, detentes, and olive branches. He is born at ground level and grows into the highest of monsters. His “species” divides into four categories – humilis (humble, small,wider than they are tall), mediocris (as tall as they are wide), and congestus (very tall and massive). The first two are “fair-weather” clouds. They generate the faces of beneficence and peace. But the third is a dark sibling – Mr. “thunderhead.” Then there is the cumulus fractus – less puffy with its edges beginning to fade away. He is the cumulus of a “ripe old age” – the old man in his eleventh hour just before the winds of time blow him away.

Author Gaven Pretor-Pinney referred to congestus as the “Darth Vader of the cloud world.” He’s tempestuous and defies anyone to stay around and watch him. He tries to obliterate everything before him. His bearded face assumes many expressions – offending and being offended, violating and being violated – as each appears like a ship’s bowsprit. His vertical breath (kundalini) flows fiercely, up and down, creating convention currents which not only endanger aircraft but spin off into “tantrums” and “purges” known as tornadoes. At several miles across and 60,000 feet high he even wears a hat (an incus, Latin for “anvil”) which looks white and calm from above but which consists of ice crystals being tossed across the sky by volatile winds. Thunder and lightning are simply a clearing of the throat announcing his arrival.

Ironically, from a distance, Preter-Pinney also says that he is also “cloud nine.” To be on cloud nine is a pleasant experience. But cumulus can be anything but pleasant. So how can this be? It happened in 1896 when an international meteorological committee convened to hammer out a classification of clouds. Mr. cumulonimbus was number nine (sadly moved to “number ten” in 1995 with new classifications). To be on Cloud Nine simply ignored his wrath – presumably, one simply saw himself on the highest cloud of all, perhaps closest to the heavens.

We’ll end this particular profile by saying that his personality is made up of a unique DNA: huge supplies of warm moist air, low-level (tropospheric) winds, and an unstable atmosphere. It sounds like the incubation process of a Frankenstein being hoisted to the roof during an electrical storm – a favorite Hollywood character.

Next in line is the less-forbidding cousin to cumulus – stratus. This cloud is aptly described as “indistinct, “featureless,” “oppressive,” “a ponderous individual… not known for [his] spontaneity.” He is generally dull and depressing, encouraging people to come inside and engage in indoor activities. He has several cousins of his own whose names befit the mood of a miasmic beast from the swamps. First cousin would be nebulosis – a low-lying featurless gray cloud which extends everywhere across the horizon. It’s like, quoting Pretor-Pinney, walking in “stagnant dishwater.”

Coming from England, I can appreciate Pretor-Pinney’s acquaintance with this entity and yearning, as he says, for just a glimpse of sunshine on occasion. This monster seems to have claimed a monopoly on England itself – and Paris in the “off” season for tourists (the term “off” referring to more than just the weather). Paris can be a miserable place during these months.

Stratus’ second cousin would be nebulus opacus – which hides the sun completely. When this guy is around it could be 10 AM or 6 PM and one would never know the difference. A third cousin which never visits enough would be translucidus which at least lets us know the relative position of the sun – that there still is a sun up there somewhere. It at least lets us know if it’s morning or afternoon. Stratus generally wears the face of a nondescript individual with “no affect” in his personality. There is no rise or fall in his range of emotions. Nothing moves him. He is simply “there” and ubiquitous. He says nothing and feels nothing. “What makes it stand out … is the very fact that it doesn’t stand out.” Yet he feels the need to consume the region and bring everyone down with him.

There is one rare cousin who shows up on occasion: undulatus. The cloud takes on a wavy appearance due to intervening winds. Sometimes he’s provoked by an outside force and actually moved enough to shake free from his comatose state, sometimes just long enough to wake up and go somewhere else.

Stratus’ conception is as follows: no thermals, a huge pocket of air cools, staying low to the ground, becoming dense. Ironically, this guy is associated with “stable” air (unlike thermals), It can be said that stability here is so extreme that it flips into paralysis. His core is a swampy thickness, difficult to breathe, fog when heavily congested. Putting it mildly, he is “profoundly unpoetic.”

About the only redeeming feature I can think of on behalf of stratus is its preference by the film noir industry. The best Sherlock Holmes, Dashiell Hammett, Agatha Christie, and Raymond Chandler flicks all take place in the thickest fog swirling around private dicks in their fedoras and trench coats. It’s almost impossible to distinguish their cigarette smoke from the fog. Films made in black & white were the perfect “gray” monochrome next to these gray backdrops.

Next in line is an “inbreeder” – that is, stratus and cumulus gets together and bears a child. Stratocumulus is like the offspring who sees all the depression around him but decides to think for himself and “bust loose.” He hates where he is, becomes oppositional-defiant, and breaks free. He bolts upward and out from the gaseous dread at ground level. He’s the cloud “in transition” – still low-lying (by definition) but showing texture and form (backbone) for the first time. And his personality shows it – a lightness or darkness of color, reaching for the sun’s brightness but also capable of rain. He breathes vertical movement.

This renegade child possesses the DNA of a truly mongrel breed. He’s literally from “everywhere.” He takes on various temporary “alter” personalities: stratiformis (most common, clumpy layers), castellanus (wavy patterns above a smooth base), and lenticularis (smooth lens-shaped) which in turn sire their own more distinguished progeny having to do with layers, gaps, alignments, and thicknesses: Duplicatus, Perlucidus, Lacunosus, Radiatus, Opacus, Transucidus and Undulatus. – These sound like wayward kids living in a Mount Olympus foster home.

Let’s move on the “mid-level” clouds – the altos. “Alto” in Latin means high, but it refers to the mid-ranges of the troposphere. This makes no sense. I suppose it’s because when the term was invented in 1855, 30,000 feet was considered “high.” But it’s also because the troposphere itself is flexible in terms of its ceiling, and there’s no fixed range for these clouds. The altocumulus is most interesting because here we have the UFO-shaped phenomena (lenticularis – flying saucers) which have stirred “sightings” and superstitions since the beginning of time. They also produce what (to me) look like upside-down tree tops clumped together in rows, like orchards. They can look like smooth perils caressing a mountain top or like fish scales riveted across the skyline.

These clouds love the mountains. They’re born “orographcially” from winds being forced vertically after hitting them and creating some of the most dramatically surreal clouds ever. The most impressive, even awesome, of these to me are the mammatus clouds, or mamma clouds meaning “breasts.” They attach themselves to the underside of many (cumulus, stratus, and cirrus) cloud types and hang like cow udders. Heat radiates upward and violently only to reverse course again and plummet. It’s literally the reverse of the normal convection current where air warms at ground level, rises, cools, and condenses. Here warm air reaches the top of the troposphere and plummets to cool down. They are plump and full when the biggest thunderstorms gather.

By contrast is its cousin – altostratus – a mid-level gray cloud which is almost featureless. This is another “pea-soup” cloud which any traveler hates navigating through. But it allows just enough sunlight through to let you know where the sun is and in fact creates a bluish-yellow “corona” around the sun and moon. As Thoreau said, this cloud can produce an almost mystical-magical effect around dawn and sunset. It’s the kind of Mediterranean feature which gives San Francisco, Provence and the Levant, their romantic appeal. I am bound to say, this is its only “silver lining.”

This should not be confused with its cousin mentioned above – nebulus opacus – the other “stagnant dishwater” cloud, featureless, monotonous, drab and dreary. Here the differences become subtle enough for only cloudspotters to recognize – halos around the sun, shadows, and cloud features (if any), one is produced by ice crystals, the other by condensation, etc. In fact, the one cloud is often in the process of becoming the other. Again, clouds are constantly becoming others or disappearing altogether.

Finally, soaring above all the masculine storm and fury below floats an ethereal version of them all – if that’s possible. In Latin cirrus means a “lock of hair” – definitely a feminine cloud. And this particular lock of hair floats at 24,000 feet and higher. She is literally above the fray of masculine fighting, his dramas of jealousy, envy, greed, and revenge. Like all the other clouds, she has five siblings (variations) and four varieties.

Like the Valkaries, this maiden may seem tranquil and transcendent by sight, but up close she is “precipitous.” No rose is without her thorns. In fact, she forecasts trouble coming in her wake. She’s the harbinger of, and prelude to, the nastiest of tempests. Far away she’s soft and motionless. But up close she’s a package of ice crystals whipped up by winds and constantly trying to crash to the earth – and failing because they’re too high to reach the ground. The crystals fall, condense, and get caught in slower air currents below them. They always look stationary but are really “the fastest-moving clouds of all.” Serenity is her visual lure and seduction, but experienced pilots and cloudspotters know better. They do not stay around to second-guess her gentle whispers.

Well, enough scientific referencing (thanks to the Cloudspotter’s Guide) – very helpful but, for me, it still gets in the way of nature’s poetry. I prefer the wooden ship and blustering bearded gods to relative humidities and pressure gradients.

The indigenous peoples of the earth must have summoned the richest lessons of all from the clouds. They saw them as living organisms. Even scientists today commit a classic Freudian lapsus linguae by (unconsciously?) seeing them as living beings, calling them “cells” – as in “single-cell organisms” (thanks again to the Guide). – It reminds me of an old episode of the Star Ship Enterprise confronting a monstrous single-celled creature in deep space, finding itself locked in its protoplasm, able to free itself only by injecting it with an “antibody.” At least for once it wasn’t “anti-matter.”

We are truly visited by celestial entities every day, ready to impart their impressions of us onto us. Like the dreamy cirrus at 60,000 feet, it tells us to look up and reflect while reminding us that all things are eternally unstable and temporary. A thunderhead is soon to follow in her tracks, replete with stagecraft equipped enough to promise a whole new docudrama in the course of human events. All we need to do is look up and decide which protagonists to side with, which antagonists to fight off with our tridents, and remember that we’re are the ones directing the cosmic play.

© 2019 Richard Hiatt

.

*Scientific names and descriptions in this article are taken from Gaven Pretor-Pinney’s book, The Cloudspotter’s Guide: The Science, History, and Culture of Clouds (Penguin Group, 2006).

NATIONAL SYMBOL

NATIONAL SYMBOL

In his book, Fragile Glory: A portrait of France and the French, Richard Bernstein aptly describes the French personality using the analogy of a car – specifically, the Renault 5 , or “R5”: tailored for driving recklessly, at high speeds, “tailgating treacherously,” for “excess speed, dangerous maneuvers, committing traffic infractions,” and so forth.

Driving in that notorious circle known as the Etoile, around the Arc de Triumphe, encapsulates France at the wheel: “By law, cars entering the circle from the right have the right-of-way … so in essence, anybody coming into the Etoile can cut in front of anybody already there. The resulting scene … the ungovernability of untrammeled mankind. Those who have the right-of-way barrel into the Etoile at full speed, trying to cut off those already in the circle, who in turn try to avoid, if they can, their legal obligation to yield. Cars assume collision courses, the one without the right-of-way attempting to get the other to make an exception, which the other usually refuses to do, causing the first to give way an instant before metal meets metal. Distances between cars are reduced to centimeters.”

Hence, the French personality: “impatient, confident, sometimes overconfident … a keen competitive desire to get ahead and stay ahead … as well as selfishness and a depersonalization of the other…. Also indicated are a solipsistic personality, the absence of a sense of civic virtue.” – Personally I would not have used “virtue” but courtesy. France has had to learn its devotion to citizenship like no other in the Western European alliance. Self-referential (solipsistic) thinking shows up more as brutal discourtesy in the theater of “untrammeled mankind.”

Bernstein also compares it’s personality to its favorite cartoon character, what he calls the “Asterix complex”: “a small, feisty, impertinent,valorous, ready-fisted inhabitant of Brittany.” He is (they are) stubborn, quick, and mentally aggressive. But they are also “a people struggling scrappily against certain limitations of size, … a people that feels, collectively … reduced in importance by the might of a rival civilization, notably the Anglo-American one.”

This whole analogy got me to thinking: “What would be the equivalent American car to match a collective American personality? And what would be America’s answer to the Etoile? Impulsively and without even thinking, I think of road-rage on the Interstate. The nation’s car is a compact but “loud” vehicle with muffler problems and a beefed-up engine no one can fix unless equipped with the factory computers designed to fix specific parts to specific motors.

But this is too simple. We’re approaching this from the wrong side because the personality of Uncle Sam isn’t the same as that of the French Marianne or Liberte. Americans don’t see themselves as “small, feisty, or impertinent.” They boast about being bigger than life, manly, macho, chiseled, valorous, righteous, moral, and most of all “chosen” by God. This requires an entirely different national vehicle.

In France, the culprit most at fault for accidents are not drugged up juvenile delinquents or violent sociopaths but average middle-aged, white-collar businessmen with “an exaggerated sense of self-control and confidence.” In America they’re the drugged-up juveniles and sociopaths. The white-collar American professional may drive recklessly and fast, but not as a rule. The guilty demographic is usually younger, less educated, and prone to legal problems. He/She is also more influenced by drugs and alcohol. In France recklessness is part of the road culture; here it is not. Here, it is an ongoing crisis which law enforcement attempts to contain with increasing futility.

So how does that configure our national car? Americans are far more diverse in their needs and tastes, and they identify with cars in equally divergent ways. Some want muscle. some want economy, some want prestige, and still others practicality and durability. Some don’t give a damn at all one way or another and see cars as simply a seat and four wheels – a way to get from A to B. Beyond that they couldn’t care less what happens to them or how continued abuse and neglect make them “look.”

In France the car is nailed down to the “R5,” BMW, Peugeot, or the Citroen. But here, according to car and truck magazines, there are as many classifications as there are cars themselves. Perusing those sources, it’s simply impossible to reduce those categories down a neatly packaged personality profile, or even a few.

That said, I’m going out on a limb to risk a stereotype – because regardless of Uncle Sam’s “multiple personality” (disorder?), there IS a national car out there just dying to be America’s national car. It WANTS to be discovered simply in order to stand out, not unlike the American flag, the American eagle, and Mount Rushmore. So let’s humor it, shall we? – And as I happen to be writing this between Memorial Day and the Fourth of July, also because I happen to live just a half-mile from the Interstate highway, perhaps the timing and location are catalysts fueling this along. I not only see it in my mind’s eye, I also hear it – and smell it.

By the way, this is something which the auto industry has been after ever since the assembly lines opened in Detroit. Every year its challenge has been to study America’s psychology, temperament, daily, needs, desires, self-image, family size, location, races, demographics, migrations, jobs, and even food preferences and religion – everything. All in order to nail America’s image of itself. Each year it changes (slightly), and each year the surveys, tracking devices (“cookies”), and surveillance cameras are activated to bring in every kind of data imaginable.

Personally, what I see, hear, and smell every single day (living in a city inside a “rural” state) is the desire for a logical contradiction – “compactly contained” muscle and size. Citizens want it both ways. Compactness (hidden size) is a reflection of environmental awareness, forbearance, and at least some accountability, hence the need for economy and “compromise.” I sense a slow forfeiture in the need for style and status and a growing emphasis on dependability and investment. This is due to an equally incremental downturn of America’s middle class. Everyday it’s more and more an issue of simple survival.

But with used parts and engines, the desire for volume and muscle persists. To me it’s also an unconscious need to express frustration – at everything from economic difficulty to government interference, corporate injustice, the growing consequences of global warming, overcrowding, and social pressures overall. It all makes one want to get out on the road and “express” himself.

Motorcycles are another expression of this (another subject for another time) but even they’ve become a political conundrum: parts for the “All-American Dream Machine” (Harley-Davidson) are now made abroad, thanks to the free-market principle of “rugged individualism” and “entrepreneurialism” (every man for himself to get rich as he must). – Nothing perplexes the American (blue collar) middle-class more than it’s pledge to the “American Way” when that means “every man for himself.” One of America’s pillars of self-recognition has “betrayed” them.

Again, what I see (and hear from the Interstate) is a “composite vehicle” of the imagination: a race-car draped in bunting and decals – perhaps – something bigger-than-life in sound and presence, but also “convertible” to the requirements of shopping, home, and children. It’s highly utilitarian yet made for showing off. It’s a huge engine that doesn’t need to go fast to impress – but impress it must.

This is what I conger in my mind from simply “listening” and retrieving “olfactory” data – not just from the highway but the roads encircling my house. Also from living in a city which is fairly balanced in blue- and white-collar demographics, politically conservative but with a growing liberal voice, notorious for its right-wing evangelism, but again with new arrivals defending more “ecumenical” points of view. – Colorado Springs is a work in progress, just like its four-wheeled national symbol.

We must then move on to America’s other favorite national pastime (and symbol) – food. “We are what we eat,” and those most visibly consumed by their food (it consumes us more than we it) are those who seem to be “least” aware of it AND “most” aware of it. For example, those who eat pig not only smell bad (like pigs), they end up looking like pigs (just my observation). Where they begin to separate is with intelligence – the pig wins. On the other end of the spectrum, those who eat lightly and “consciously” (mostly vegetarian, but not always) incorporate the food’s history into the meal, kept alive and nurtured for as long as possible, using the concept of chi (life force) as a standard. For them eating is a spiritual give & take. – These are the two polarities on a scale of what is generically called “food consciousness.” For one it’s practically nonexistent; for the other it’s absolutely core to responsible consumption and optimum health.

That said, there are cultures out there which make food a daily mantra, an art form, and the centerpiece of day-to-day existence. Everything is organic, meticulously grown and prepared, raised with love and care, attended to in every stage of growth, and harvested at just the right moment. Again, from Bernstein’s book, a not-surprising tribute to the French:

“The French are not fat. Their devotion to food does not involve gluttony, only considerable expense. They eat discreet amounts. They do not load up on chocolate bars, potato chips, or frozen yogurt between meals. But they do love to eat. Almost every region has its remarkable delicacies, whether cheese or truffles, foie gras, preserved ducks, spices, or the great varieties of wines. A meal at a truly great restaurant is a sort of theater you can eat…. The served plate itself is a kind of flower arrangement, an interior decorator’s invention.”

“There is no typical great menu.” Bernstein then breaks into a universe of “works of art”: “hors d’oeuvre, sauteed fat duck’s liver with grapes or a pastry crust with gray shrimp or … thin slices of warm sweetbreads in a salad or a lobster-and-crayfish soup…. filets of sole with oysters and asparagus tips, scallops … roasted potatoes, and watercress …. roasted pigeon with parsley and sweet garlic … rabbit thighs with whole plumbs, veal stew with corn plinis and foie gras … cheeses from cow’s milk and goat’s milk, hard cheeses and soft cheeses, creemy cheeses and dry cheeses, cheeses with crusts and cheeses without, aromatic cheeses, cheeses doused in spices and marinated in olive oil, blue cheeses and yellow cheeses, cheeses that seem to have absorbed into themselves the very breath of the earth.” Dessert: “caramelized Gascony peaches flambeed in cognac, little apple tarts with apple sorbet and peach sauce.” – We won’t even begin to broach the subject of breads and wines.

Not to suggest that the French never eat badly. For the record, there are bad French restaurants and bad food (bread, wine, cheese, fruit) made for fixed incomes and sold at fixed prices. And many French citizens get by on repetitive, restrictive diets in this manner. But again, they do not overeat, they do not gouge themselves with junk, and they are rarely ever fat. Again – food consciousness. – And we might add that France alone does not hold a patent on this: Italy, Germany, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands – all pride themselves on their native foods, their “artful” preparation and consumption.

I need not even begin to waste time trying to find an American equivalent to this; that is, a national diet. It’s almost embarrassing to try. If I were to search for one, it would almost have to comply with it’s first priority for almost everything – speed and mass-production (i.e., profit). In that sense, food might as well be carburetors and motor oil because they’re treated the same. The first foods that naturally come to mind are “fast foods,” specifically, the burger and fries. If not this, then pork or beefsteak and baked potato. Most homemade dishes are beef and pork-based with perhaps a salad and garnish of “something green” and frozen. This is then followed by terribly sweetened desserts – and of course “munching” before and after meals on highly processed sugar products. This is a “cuisine” which lends America its other great distinction: first prize for diabetes, obesity, and heart disease.

Most nutritionists know by now (or should know) that the ratio of foods best fitted to our place in human evolution should coincide with our ratio of teeth in our mouths. It’s a ratio of 4:2:1 – that is, 4 parts cereal grain (molars) , 2 parts vegetables (incisors) , 1 part meat (canines). It makes perfect sense. But of course expecting Americans to heed this is like expecting cats to eat spinach. This again is food consciousness.

It reminds me of high- and low-end dog food: The cheap stuff requires more to meet a dog’s nutritional needs; whereas quality food satisfies those needs with less. With the cheap stuff your dog eats more, retains less of anything good, and ends up overweight. In the end, you get what you pay for – like human, like dog.

Cars and food aside, something else qualifies as a nation’s national symbol – its capital cities. Traditionally, cities have always captured a kind of self-awareness of their respective nationalities and cultures – digesting them, containing them, then amplifying and celebrating them. Each capital became the pride of that particular nation, the place everyone went to remind themselves of who they were – whether through its art, food, customs, national religion, or politics. This was by far what has always made cities like London, Paris, Munich, Venice, Barcelona, and Vienna great. Not to diminish the differences between city and country (of which there are many distinctions), a visitor can still spend time in any one capital and get a strong sense of where he is, a native of who he is.

So, it begs the question: Where in America can a visitor from a foreign land get the same exultation, the same frisson of awareness? IS there such a place? Of course the argument is again presented “oh, but we’re a mongrel mass of checkered histories and races” making “one” spiritual epicenter impossible. This is true. But it may also contribute to what seems to be a never-ending national identity crisis? There’s no place to go to find oneself as a citizen. It’s found everywhere which becomes nowhere, because it’s different everywhere. One person sees “America” as amber waves and Iowa corn, another through his religion, another through politics and Wall Street, another through ethnicity and race, and still another through the lens of oppression and injustice. At day’s end, what is one to believe, especially when he needs an affirmation/confirmation of citizenship?

In each great European city the national identity grew from decrees, fashions, ideas, trends, debates, laws, and censures which their respective rural communities used as touchstones of renewal. In America one finds it in an abstraction, a state of mind, or an idea pressed upon him everyday in the national literature (or media). Sometimes it’s enough to sustain him, sometimes it isn’t enough.

As an aside to this, it’s interesting that historically the great cities all seem to have sprouted from river-bends. That is, London grew from a bend in the Thames, Berlin from a bend in the River Spree, Vienna from a bend in the Danube, and Paris began on the Ile de la Cite in the sixth century spreading out on both sides of the Seine. — Jamestown started from the east bank in the James (Powhatan) River, and Washington City from a bend in the Potomac. But those American settlements would not become epicenters of cultural identity. They’re simply remembered as isolated dates and events in US history. We don’t look to Jamestown or even Washington when searching to renew ourselves, at least not with the same reverence the British feel towards London or the French towards Paris. Washington is too often a metaphor of complaint, conflict, alienation, and disunion.

Hence, our over-reliance on more superficial “identifiers” which are fluid and fleeting. Wall Street takes over telling us to be this trend, that fashion, or an expected economic status. It doesn’t work. They become nothing more but temporary sugar-highs. It feeds a desperation which too often leads to shallow (and corrupting) forms of nationalism. Small nations can get by with a strong nationalist focus because there are fewer people who are more homogeneous and usually needing to defend their rights before unstable governments. But large nations like the US, full of diversity, too quickly listen to single groups claiming authority over everything which only leads to authoritarianism. Christopher Hitchens said, “It was the dense and boring and selfish who had always seen identity politics as their big chance.”

There is a plus side and a downside to being a nation of disparate immigrants and “mongrels.” It’s our strength, but also an eternal challenge to finding an identity. The “abstraction” which we adhere to is an unum found in the pluribus: we are in fact more a patchwork quilt than a melting pot. Each “quilt” defends the rights of every other quilt to be different – and that principle alone is our unum. Those who don’t understand that (or feel comfortable with intangibles) are the ones who militate to groups. Those who do understand it allow themselves to shift with the political winds, like a chameleon. Underneath it all, “that is America.”

Given that, there is no national symbol for America except in its nature to change and resist “fixed” identities. One either sees it and defends it for what it is, or he doesn’t. So we can forgo the quest for an American car, an American food, and even an American “city on the hill.” We are quite literally set adrift in our self-made abstractions, states of mind, and ideas – eternally experimental, fleeting, fugitive, evasive, defiant, disorderly, slippery, and at times filled with high-fructose corn syrup.

© 2019 Richard Hiatt