The Whole Fam Damly

So, March 26 was an enromously long day. I started in Los Angeles and drove to Pasadena with my brother. We had breakfast with EJ and SJ and played with their wonderful labradoodle Quigley. I’m going to try to upload some pictures of Quigley. He is as fun to touch as his name is to say, he has a very sweet nature, and he is well-trained. Props to the Js for having great taste in most everything, including dogs.

From Pasadena we set out for Las Vegas. On the way we saw land sailors. They are wheeled carts with big sails and they just shoot across the desert at terrific speed.

Things in the desert appear in the panorama even when they are very far away. A mountain range appears on the horizon 30 minutes or more before it is reached, and the utter emptiness of the intervening space makes for a lack of references for scale. One drives at 85 mph or more, but seemingly without moving, since the mountains don’t get perceptibly closer. Therefore, Las Vegas appeared hours before we reached it. Partly the delay was due to the desert-distance contraction illusion, but mostly it was due to the traffic time-dilation effect.

Vegas held two main attractions for us: the Bodies exhibit and the Cirque du Soleil Mystere show.

BODIES

These were way more dead people in 90 minutes than I had seen in my entire life up until that point. It reminded me of those old paintings of a philosopher holding a skull. The Cliffs notes explanation is always, “Man contemplates his own mortality.” But viewing and handling (indeed, interrogating—to take a page from Bruno Latour) the remains of the dead is one rather specific way to contemplate one’s mortality, and a powerful one, at least for me. Especially considering that I’m not going to medical school and will not get the opportunity afforded by a course in gross anatomy to interrogate the remains of the dead, I’m glad I went.

A few disconnected impressions:

The heart is smaller than I expected.

A lot of our insides look like plants, branching and so forth.

The brain is smaller than I expected.

The uterus is way, way, way, smaller than I expected.

The pyloric sphincter is really substantial.

The embryo develops really quickly.


MYSTERE

I have seen Cirque du Soleil three times in my life, and I think only during this show did I understand the importance of the clowns. Cirque du Soleil has the world’s best acrobats, and they will be flipping around impressing everyone, while some clown gawks on, inexpertly bouncing a ball or something. Why the clown? Why draw the audience’s eyes off the performance onto something merely odd?

I think it has to do with the need for scale and perspective. After 30 minutes or so of watching the most astounding, eye-popping of stunts, the audience can’t help but cease to be quite so impressed every time someone jumps from one flying trapeze to another. In the absence of clowns, the implicit narrative becomes somewhat Roman: Bigger, higher, more extreme! But that is not the only possible narrative. The clowns call our attention to the other possible narratives. They validate the other feelings the performance evokes in us—wonder, fear, concern for the safety of the performers, haughtiness (e.g. “I could do that”), even boredom, and thereby give the experience more richness. For example, to give voice to our concern for the safety of the performers, Mystere employs two clowns acting as children—one an enormous, ugly, baby; the other a distracted and winsome little girl. Both children innocently (or not so innocently) walk into dangerous situations, play with things they should not, and evoke the parental concern of the audience. Having gasped and laughed at the clowns’ antics, we feel freer to let ourselves experience concern for the acrobats—these human performers with superhuman powers. The trope of parenthood is a brilliant one: our children’s exploits and accomplishments give us naches (because our children are exceeding us), but we also look on their bravery as foolhardy daring (since we also are painfully aware of how fragile our children are, and perhaps a little jealous that they can do what we cannot). How much more richly we experience the performance when we can experience some of these emotions toward the performers.

Anyway, there are other important ways in which the phenomenon of implicit narrative affects our public and private life, which I hope to explore in later posts. For now, BRING IN THE CLOWNS!

March 27 we left Las Vegas and drove to Hoover Dam. Hoover Dam provoked mixed feelings for me. Visually, the Dam and Lake Mead are an ugly scar on the Earth. It is sad the way we’ve choked off the Colorado river. Nevertheless, the flood protection and electricity the dam provides are very valuable. Projects like these allow people to make the desert commercially and agriculturally useful. Hoover Dam makes the desert bloom. And it is also a testament to human ingenuity and cooperation.

However, it makes the desert bloom in a wasteful way. Hoover Dam enables the ubiquitous fountains of Las Vegas, the golf courses of Arizona, the endless tract homes and rotary sprinklers of Southern California. The money spent on maintaining the dam could be spent much more effectively if people conserved water. Differential flush toilets are much cheaper than dams and do just as much to make the desert bloom. There is more potential for solar power generation on the roofs of Las Vegas than there is for hydroelectric generation in the Colorado river, but instead of putting up solar panels, they top those ugly houses with dark, heat-trapping roofs and then cool them houses with electric air conditioners powered by the dam.

And it is a little sick how much human blood went into that dam. 96 official deaths during construction, but that number is low because it doesn’t even count workers mortally injured on the job who died at the hospital off site, not to mention those who met early deaths from chronic illnesses they contracted on the job site. A project of that size (read Big Dig) would never finish ahead of schedule and under budget today, but I am happy that we value workers’ safety more now than they did in the 30s.

The Israelis have made the desert bloom in a less spectacular, but more impressive way. Their ethic emphasizes conservation over production, understanding the land over dominating it. And, significantly, the Zionists intended to improve themselves as they improved the land. They set up new kinds of communities, tried social experiments in the desert (and still do). The Americans simply infected the desert with the same counterproductive, socially isolating forms of development they originated elsewhere and let the ‘burbs spread over the sands without a thought.