I Clear water in a brilliant bowl, Pink and white carnations. The light In the room more like a snowy air, Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow At the end of winter when afternoons return. Pink and white carnations – one desires So much more than that. The day itself Is simplified: a bowl of white, Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round, With nothing more than the carnations there.
II Say even that this complete simplicity Stripped one of all one’s torments, concealed The evilly compounded, vital I And made it fresh in a world of white, A world of clear water, brilliant-edged, Still one would want more, one would need more, More than a world of white and snowy scents.
III There would still remain the never-resting mind, So that one would want to escape, come back To what had been so long composed. The imperfect is our paradise. Note that, in this bitterness, delight, Since the imperfect is so hot in us, Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.
‘So, why did most people want to move to the city? It seems like the same lure as today: freedom from a set life pattern and higher urban wages.’
If we focus on immigrants without specialized skills, the biggest draw tends to be economic opportunity: Life is hard, and people tend to move in migratory patterns, following the trail left by friends and family. Some have better character than others. A few incentives might be enough (subsidized housing, lax punishment on labor laws, cousin got a job etc.).
Go down to the docks, or the restaurants by the tracks, and ask for Pedro or Ricky or Chiang, and they don’t ask too many questions if you show up on time.
For more highly educated and skilled migrants, it’s still the economy, stupid. The specific skills means these folks compete directly for higher wage jobs. If your industry is centered in a foreign country (say, tech in the U.S.), then some mixture of necessity, opportunity, ambition means you go where the jobs are.
Some have better character than others, but the barriers to entry usually indicate what employers want and used to seek in a college degree: Specific marketable and in-demand skills, along with some degree of regulated emotions and internal motivation. Technology in the U.S. has seen a huge increase in East Asian (Chinese, mostly) and South Asian (Indians mostly) in the past fifteen years. Both of these civilizations are producing a surplus of talented engineering and data science talent.
Go talk to Ron and/or Chiang and/or Kulwinder when you’re applying for the Data Engineer II position. Pull your weight and add value, and you might be able to build a life. Your goal may be full integration (raise the kids as Americans and die here), or it may be a four-year stint and return home, or some hazy mix in-between.
For Americans moving from small towns to big cities, of course, it’s still the economy, stupid. If you’re homegrown, you already speak the language, already have citizenship and a fatter tightrope to walk. Even if you have no money and prospects, you’ll likely have a softer landing than a foreigner. Some of us Americans have better character than others.
Oh don’t worry, our politicians will claim to look out for you, but it will now much more resemble a Euro-type model (more politicians controlling the money supply).
‘People moving to the city have been illogical risk takers from the beginning. and the key is probably they like the sexual or mating opportunities inherent in large groups. Playing to that angle would bring in hipsters and gays. As to whether that’s the key to the health of cities or our nation, I doubt it, but it won’t hurt, especially because one of the best ways of making a city fun to go out in is that it’s safe for young women.’
A lot of tall, smart, ambitious guys, and beautiful, smart, ambitious women gravitate towards Manhattan, for example.
Richard Florida suggested this trend, of hipster and gay migration, attached to a ‘knowledge’ class, is the way forward for American cities; It’s SoHo/NYU/Wall Street all the way down, baby. I suspect there is a pretty Left-Of-Center political philosophy under there with a lot of ‘class’ analysis and obsession with income inequality.
As I see the world, this tends to follow the Left-Of-Center model which ultimately resolves to something like ‘whatever-you’re-for-we’re-against’. You get good music, art, food and museums out of this model, but a lot of crime, chaos and corruption. The knowledge claims are questionable, especially when it comes to ‘intellectuals’ and ‘theory’. It’s usually no place to raise a kid, grow old, nor have much stability (stability grows in rings around the city). This view also tends to over-value creativity and the arts, championing liberation over liberty, redistribution over wealth creation, and making education/health-care the highest goods in the City.
I’d been wondering about the cultural angle: The hipsters were a third round of generally youthful rebellion (post-beat, post-hippie), fueled by a counter-culture ethos heavily invested in the Arts, individualism to the point of semi-nihilism, while harboring radical tendencies. There is a natural desire to break with the more traditional and religious models of organization typically found in small towns and rural areas, and also to follow the ‘Zeitgeist’ towards racial and ethnic diversity in meritocratic and multicultural harmony.
The New York Times seems hyperbolically invested in this model, metamorphosing into something like ‘The Guardian’ in London (a few idealists–>lots of activists–>a few radicals). This is to say nothing of the political corruption for which big cities like New York and Chicago are typically known. Big-city political machines were the way to a better life for most of those immigrant groups thrown into the pot, but they are also notoriously corrupt, full of clientalism and machine pols.
This leaves cities like Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburg still floating out there, unable to live off the fat of trade and finance, immigration and cheap labor, museums and tourism. The more left-leaning they are, the more likely to prioritize anti-corporate bias. The lost industrial base, along with the lack of a strong knowledge-based economy leaves them with a brain-drain and difficult prospects.
Are energy, agriculture, low taxes and a strong private sector enough? What about the cultural shifts going on?
Interesting reads: Predictions are hard, especially about the future.
‘As I have argued elsewhere, there are two competing models of successful American cities. One encourages a growing population, fosters a middle-class, family-centered lifestyle, and liberally permits new housing. It used to be the norm nationally, and it still predominates in the South and Southwest. The other favors long-term residents, attracts highly productive, work-driven people, focuses on aesthetic amenities, and makes it difficult to build. It prevails on the West Coast, in the Northeast and in picturesque cities such as Boulder, Colorado and Santa Fe, New Mexico. The first model spurs income convergence, the second spurs economic segregation. Both create cities that people find desirable to live in, but they attract different sorts of residents.’
Joel Kotkin. Omaha vs. San Francisco?:
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Walter Russell Mead takes a look at the blue model (the old progressive model) from the ground up in NYC to argue that it’s simply not working. Check out his series at The American Interest. Technology is changing things rapidly, and maybe, as Charles Murray points out, it’s skewing the field toward high IQ positions while simultaneously getting rid of industrial, managerial, clerical, labor intensive office jobs. Even so, we can’t cling to the past. This is quite a progressive vision but one that embraces change boldly. Repost-Via Youtube: Conversations With History – Walter Russell Mead
Digging through the past and digging at the thing, a body almost lovingly rendered, made alive on the tongue, looking inward and trying to look forward.
I remain convinced that a blog/online presence is secondary to life. A way to document one’s experiences with the things that really matter (many ideas really matter).
Most social media doesn’t seem worth making one’s Self small to fit in the sewer pipes of online communication (a work in progress, these pipes).
Don’t get me wrong, we all gotta pay the rent. I have some admiration for the desire not to starve. God Bless the ones who make me laugh.
The most interesting writers of the day are usually idea merchants; spreading down their cloths upon the cobbles. I admire people gifted enough to display the thoughts of others as though their own.
Living takes it out of you. When you need ideas, may you find what you need. Most importantly, the thoughts you have become your habits, and your habits become your character.
No one gets out alive.
I think that’s why we have this old and important story about the Resurrection…
Nice to get more background from this very good piece:
Cole’s life was anything but insular,” these curators write in their catalogue introduction. “Rather, it was marked by restless transatlantic travel and by a complex, often troubled, engagement with the traditions of European art and thought, a commitment that countered, but paradoxically also heightened, Cole’s abiding passion for the American wilderness.”
and:
‘The painterly innovations Cole picked up in Europe, in particular the mechanics for plein-air oil sketching, inspired the florid naturalism of his American disciples. Yet Cole himself was always less and something more than a pure landscape painter. Unlike the later landscapes of Church or Durand, where nature speaks for itself, Cole used nature to speak for his ideas. Of course, all great landscape painting says something, but Cole’s messaging was more explicit.’
As previously posted:
A good decade ago, while visiting D.C., I saw Thomas Cole’s ‘The Voyage Of Life:‘
‘Although Cole had ample commissions in the late 1820s to paint pictures of American scenery, his ambition was to create a “higher style of landscape” that could express moral or religious meanings.’
‘In the late 1830s, Cole was intent on advancing the genre of landscape painting in a way that conveyed universal truths about human existence, religious faith, and the natural world. First conceived in 1836, the four pictures comprising The Voyage of Life: Childhood, Youth, Manhood, and Old Age fulfilled that aspiration.’
These scenes in the Romantic style can have an emotional pull for me, as generally does the work of the Hudson River School. Such allegory certainly tends to function as a vehicle into memory (Cole’s work has really stuck with me…in a sort of haunting way, mixed with some thought of how I’m supposed to live and what might be coming next).
Also, the wild, untamed nature we Americans have often faced is perhaps requiring of a spirited and grand attempt at putting our experiences within Nature into some context: To soar as high as our hopes often do.
Or at least, to find in paintings: Familiarity. I like to see the roll of a hill like I’ve seen, or an opening of clouds, sky and light like I’ve seen.
Perhaps Wild Nature can be ordered in a Romantic, neo-classical or more modern way. Perhaps Nature can be made, with the tools at our disposal, to conform to some of our deeper ideas about Nature, mirroring our hopes in some recognizable fashion; giving some basic comfort and meaning.
Maybe, after all, we can find a home here.
On the other hand, allegory with overt moral/religious meaning can also come across as heavy-handed, sentimental, and moralistic. Too lush and pretentious; perhaps a bit anachronistic.
Do I really have to hunt for all the symbols and put the puzzle together?
‘So, you’re going to reveal universal truths, eh?’
—
This can seem distant from the experiences of the modern viewer, often finding himself a little further down the modern/postmodern ‘river’, where such attempts at universality might seem a wash.
Much more common these days are the very personal shards and glimpses of the inner life of an artist, attached to high ambition and great talent surely in some cases; as well to form and tradition, but generally making less bold claims to knowledge than ‘The Voyage Of Life‘.
In painting, I’m reminded of the abstract expressionist movement seeking meaning in reducing experience to the abstract in order to reveal something essential within Nature, or essential about our relationship to Nature: A transcendent place where shape, form and color can be isolated from anything immediately recognizable in the world.
‘The movement’s name is derived from the combination of the emotional intensity and self-denial of the German Expressionists with the anti-figurative aesthetic of the European abstract schools such as Futurism, the Bauhaus, and Synthetic Cubism. Additionally, it has an image of being rebellious, anarchic, highly idiosyncratic and, some feel, nihilistic.[5] In practice, the term is applied to any number of artists working (mostly) in New York who had quite different styles, and even to work that is neither especially abstract nor expressionist.’
The exploration of the Self is often pursued, as well as that of Nature, but the general hope that it might all make sense (life, death, Nature, purpose etc) in many more modern movements is often left abandoned.
Or so often, as we’ve seen in the past few generations: The pursuit of The Self can easily become subsumed to the pursuit of fame, celebrity, and money.
***
Towards a theme: Perhaps you’ve also heard of the Rothko chapel, in Houston, Texas.
Mark Rothko undertook the idea that within the modern context, one could create temples of universal meaning through aesthetics, art, and beauty:
‘The Rothko Chapel, founded by Houston philanthropists John and Dominique de Menil, was dedicated in 1971 as an intimate sanctuary available to people of every belief. A tranquil meditative environment inspired by the mural canvases of Russian born American painter Mark Rothko (1903-1970), the Chapel welcomes over 60,000 visitors each year, people of every faith and from all parts of the world.’
