Absolutely
lovely Sunday outside.
Idyllic. One of those
counterfactual superlatives to throw back at the world that derides this town
as hopelessly polluted. Yes it
sucks some days. But not
today. Perfect soundtrack this day
that oozes optimism, and possibility.
“Intentions” is the opening track of one of the only George Adams albums
available on Rdio, “Paradise Space Shuttle” from 1979. Such were the sorts of things one
titled one’s albums in 1979.
Looking at pictures of the tenor player I’m almost certain I saw him
play with Don Pullen at Wesleyan in 1986 or so. His face is very familiar. I’ve played the tune three times in a row now and it
makes me think of walking around lower Manhattan on a Sunday with a big smile
and nothing, whatsoever to do.
I woke up this morning and got beat twice, which was
nice. My little one has a friend coming over and is preparing a menu that she and her friend will prepare. I lured her away from her cookbook
research earlier into a game of chess. The
board sits prominently in our living room, but it isn’t always in use. “I’ll give you the first five
moves.” That caught her
attention. “Let me use them whenever
I want.” OK. She played well from
the outset and caught my knight when I was being careless. But by the time I assembled some
unforgiving firepower at her king in the corner she utilized her three moves
and pinned mine into check-mate.
I encouraged her to play her older sister who’d quietly
risen and made her way downstairs during the heat of competition. “Hey, you’re the winner,” but she
demurred. “I’ll watch.” No fool, her older sister, had heard
there was a special offer on multiple-moves and she requested three. “Do you want to take them all up
front?” I asked hopefully?
“No. I’ll let you know
when.”
If there are different, higher and lower level, orders of
thinking, “I’m hungry” vs. “Why am I here?” I think “winning” must be not too
much higher up than eating and defecating. “I want to win.”
It’s primal. “It’s only a
game,” higher ordered reasoning.
Certainly both are in motion with any game of chess. Having been womped moments earlier I
was smarting now to win 势在必得[1], and set out to decimate my daughter's kingdom. Judiciously banking her
extra moves she unveiled them artfully, moments before facing certain doom, and
forced the crown off my kings head back in the lower left corner of my
realm. Two victorious
daughters: a higher-order balm to massage
the lower-order lion that set out for, but did not secure anything to eat.
Another twelve pages or so aloud, with Winston
followed. Orwell has Winston
wandering around in the proles
quarter encountering antiques and people older than 60 and trying to discern a
bit of higher order thinking of his own.
What was it really like before the revolution? Winston considers a room without a tele-screen and taps into
a primal memory of sitting about, without any surveillance. Pausing, I asked my daughter to
consider a China that was, effectively worse. Within eighteen years of the publishing of “1984” gangs of
teens were empowered to scour Beijing looking for and summarily destroying any
old things they found. The simple
transaction Winston conducts, where he purchased the old piece of India glass
from the shopkeeper wouldn’t have simply been frowned on by a Party member, it
would have been entirely illegal.
Hard to consider Big Brother as an under achiever, but some of what was
to transpire in China, youth gangs destroying “the four olds” for example,
seems even beyond the pale for Orwell.
Certainly the higher-order “intentions” on-line feminist
protests wouldn’t have had much of a chance in either milieu. Pleased, I was, to see the courageous
actions of these four young ladies in Guangzhou. They posted an online photo in their tee-shirts, that seems
to sport a character with its middle finger in the air, with the phrase: “My
vagina does not come free with my labor,” on their bodies and on a white board. This, in response to a story of a woman
who was recently raped and killed in an after work drinking session in
Chongqing. Are online
feminist protests permissible? I
wouldn’t have thought that this would have been allowed to stay up but the link
to Sina suggests any Chinese person is still free to view it, consider it. Organize around it? http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/22/womens-photo-says-it-all-no-sexual-freebies-with-work/?ref=asia
Last night my wife called me over somewhat surprised and
read me a bit by some Chinese intellectual suggesting that a belief in God is
central to Chinese thinking and that a Christian-like Reformation is critical
to the evolution of Chinese moral thinking. Controversial from so many angles I was primarily interested
in the fact that it was allowed to exist, on line at all. Posted on Tencent’s QQ news I challenged
my wife that if it really said all that it probably wouldn’t still be up
tomorrow. It’s still there. http://cul.qq.com/a/20140718/049772.htm
And of course the
article is a bit different than what was reported to me and less controversial
than what I initially imagined.
But, like the feminists in Guangzhou it serves to reinforce how broad
and varied the discourse is on the Chinese web, a place I have many assumptions
about, but little immediate experience with. It is my “intention” then, to change that this year, once
this particular 365-day globe spins’ been spun, in thirty-six days or so. Set out with a new goal to win,
then, in the contest against myself.
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