Eucatastrophe Reader

"I come from two countries. One is thirsty the other is on fire"

North by Brad Kessler REVIEW

“’Sheeko, sheeko,’
Sahro would say when she was ready.
‘Gather here. Listen, I have a story.’
Then Ayaan would respond from the dark.
‘Sheeko xarir.’
‘Make your story smooth as silk.’

Brad Kessler’s novel, North, was chosen as a college-wide staff summer reading selection. I can see why. It is set in Vermont and introduces us to a cast of characters that force the reader to wrestle with the moral implications of immigration policy. Clearly, every citizen and every State in the union will have to declare just what they believe about the rights of documented and undocumented immigrants in the coming years. Vermont will not escape this test as this novel reveals.

Three principle characters in this novel have intersecting story arcs. Sahro is an immigrant who came to the U.S. from Somalia via a long and torturous trek through South and Central America. She is a devout Muslim. Father Christopher is the abbot of a Benedictine monastery in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont who ponders what the purpose of a monastery is in a modern world losing its commitments to religious lifestyles like the one he and his monks have chosen. Teddy is an injured and traumatized Afghan war veteran who serves as the monastery’s groundskeeper.

One late winter evening, Sahro’s accomplice drives Sahro towards the Canadian border after her application for asylum seems about to be rejected under the Trump administration’s stricter enforcement policies. Her car goes off the road where Teddy finds Sahro and takes her to the monastery for sanctuary. Soon, an immigration officer in search of Sahro arrives asking questions and the monks of the monastery have to make a decision. One is reminded of Vermont’s tradition of defying the Fugitive Slave Laws in the decade before the Civil War. What exactly are the relationships between civic duty to obey civil laws and moral and religious arguments requiring that one protect “the stranger”?  

Here is how Kessler introduces us to Father Christopher.

“No one wanted to be a monk anymore in the twenty-first century. The long-hoped-for ‘monastic revival’ the Order envisioned never materialized. Even Father Christopher had to admit: their way of life was dying. . . . It seemed the only thing left for the monks to do: watch the world change . . . and pray.”

Here is the author’s introduction to Sahro:

“Gone was her elegant hijab, her olive scarf, the long dirac, replaced with clothes she’d hoped would let her fit in. Yet who was she fooling, she wondered, sitting beside the window for all the world to see? Surely someone would notice she didn’t belong. The Alien, the Undocumented. The names she’d recently learned: Asylee. Terrorist. Haji. Didn’t she wear her unbelonging in her eyes? In her narrow face, her walnut skin? In her accent and overstuffed bag? . . . Strangers, she learned, came in only two forms: those who’d help and those who’d harm—but mostly came the latter. The key was knowing the difference, discerning something deeper than their words, a sensation or feel.”

Here is Kessler’s description of Sahro’s legal jeopardy given the political context in which she has arrived.

“Advice and warnings. Everyone on edge since the American election—everyone’s plans thrown into doubt since talk of a Muslim Ban. Was it better for Sahro to go through a sham hearing in New York City, only to be put on a plane back to Somalia? After all the time and money, the anguish and pain? With only a two-percent outcome, wasn’t it best to just pick up and walk away and disappear? Do what the ancestors always did? Find another pasture, another place farther north? Fartumo and Ahmed knew some Americans who might help. A sanctuary group that sheltered asylees and ferried them across the border to Canada. Yes, it was illegal (the lawyer couldn’t know a thing, and neither should Sahro’s American sponsor). But all the family agreed: Canada was now Sahro’s best option.”

Here is how Kessler describes her decision:

“After everything Sahro had been through—Mexico and Central America, her months in detention—surely she deserved a chance. Hadn’t she been tested over and over? Hadn’t she played by the rules, done all the right things, honestly asked for asylum? Why would they deny her now?”

As the novel progresses, Kessler grants us a detailed story of the causes for Sahro’s decision to leave Mogadishu Somalia and the the arduous and dangerous journey that is required of anyone desperate enough to make the attempt to come to America in search of a better life.

Sahro refers to a poem by Warsan Shire, a Somali poet when explaining her decision to risk her life to come to America.

She had to leave, she says, because “the water is safer than the land.” An internet search finds the poem that this line comes from and I reproduce it below in entirety.

Home" by Warsan Shire

no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well
your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.
no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilet
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.
you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied
no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one skin would be tough enough
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
niggers with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess ours up
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off
or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hunger
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important
no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here

It becomes clear that as much as Sahro appreciates the Americans who help her along her journey, she would prefer life with family in Somalia if only Somalia was not Somalia. She can only hope that Canada will come closer to being a “home” than America is proving itself to be. Kessler relates her experience in a NJ detention center.

“They’d let her out of the warehouse under the condition that she wear the thing [ankle bracelet] until her hearing. For the privilege, the family had to pay six hundred dollars a week and she couldn’t travel beyond the borough, and she had to report each evening to an ICE agent. All of which she’d dutifully done for months, the shackle a constant reminder her life was still on hold, that someone might be listening or watching wherever she went, while the GPS sent signals into space and someone read them on a screen, her exact coordinates, down to the degree and second, pinpointing her in place, the same technology the American forces used, Angela Simms once told her, to target bombs.”

“She angled the blades between the plastic band and her shin. Who could intercede in His [Allah’s] presence without His permission? He knows what appears before and after His creatures. His throne extends over the heavens and the earth.”

[She crosses the Rubicon by cutting the tracking device off.]

“She was no longer a flashing dot somewhere on a computer screen but a fugitive now, a flame. . . . And with each mile north the world turned whiter and whiter than Sahro had ever seen.”

The novel leaves the reader with questions about belonging that arise in the lives of migrants, abbots, and Afghan Vets. They all seek a sanctuary where they can feel like they are safe and belong. They all struggle with feelings of dislocation, broken attachment, and  the longing for an environment that does not reject them outright.

Each of the main characters wrestles with their life’s decisions and where those decisions have placed them. Numerous connections between Father Christopher and Sahro can be made though they come from very different religious traditions. Both of them define themselves by those traditions. Indeed, religious tradition serves as the central defining source of their identity. Here is what Sahro has to say about the role that religious tradition plays in her self-definition:

“From that day on, her grandmother taught her the names, the long line of ancestors, her father’s lineage. Each afternoon they sat outside the hut and her grandmother recited the names and Sahro repeated them back one at a time, each in order, like beads on a string, until they made a long chain leading back, her ayeeyo said, to the Prophet Himself, Peace Be Upon Him. That lineage, that chain, her ayeeyo said, was the most vital thing she owned: the rope that anchored her to the past and the future. A network of clan and sub-clan, the nomadic vine. If she knew the names, if she could recall them all, she’d never be lost in the world. If she knew where she’d come from, she’d know where she was going. She’d always have the names to hang on to.”

“The constellations were like separate clans,her grandfather told her. Each had their own section of sky and they often fought, but some stars could travel between sections. These stars belonged to many constellations but wholly to none, and in this way they were unusual and unique, like messengers able to travel safely between hostile worlds. Sahro was like those stars, he said. She had that ability too; she’d already shown it. She too could travel between worlds unharmed. It’s what made her special.”

Father Christopher is also marinated in the traditions of his religious order. Indeed, when faced with the decision to comply with ICE and surrender Sahro or help her flee to Canada, he structures his decision within the tradition of Benedictine Christianity. He explains to Sahro that the Holy family was protected from a genocide by their stay in Egypt. When asking his fellow monks for their approval of his decision, he refers to religious traditions going all the way back to the first monks who fled violence under the Roman Emperors for sanctuary in monasteries. “Some of us here in the cloister” he says,

“misuse the idea of fuga mundi—‘flight from the world’—as an excuse to simply evade responsibility and pretend we don’t live in the real world, or to hide in the hold of our ship, like Jonah, and avoid what’s being asked of us. And sometimes the cloister itself becomes the belly of the whale, a warm, comfortable womb sunk beneath the sea, safe from the storms, where we can live in our watery twilight between the living and the dead holed up inside our own leviathan.”

Knowing that a number of the monks will not feel comfortable participating in the civil disobedience required in harboring a fugitive from law enforcement, he prepares a package of materials for them to consider.

“’I put together a packet of readings,’ he announced, ‘in the hopes of clarifying any questions regarding our guest.’”

“He finished handing out the pages and pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. ‘Would anyone like to begin?’ No one volunteered right away. The men were shuffling through the stapled pages. Brother Luke lifted a hand and began reading the first lines from Exsul Familia Nazarethana, the 1952 papal decree that established Rome’s stance on immigrants and refugees.”

“’The émigré Holy Family of Nazareth,’ Luke read, ‘fleeing into Egypt, is the archetype of every refugee family. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, living in exile in Egypt to escape the fury of an evil king, are, for all times and all places, the models and protectors of every migrant, alien, and refugee of whatever kind who, whether compelled by fear of persecution or by want, is forced to leave his native land, his beloved parents and relatives, his close friends, and to seek a foreign soil. For the almighty and most merciful God decreed that His only Son, ‘being made like unto men and appearing in the form of a man,’ should, together with His Immaculate Virgin Mother and His holy guardian Joseph, be in this type too of hardship and grief, the firstborn among many brethren, and precede them in it.’”

“Luke continued reading about the church’s motherly solicitude for migrants, how the church must look after them with special care and unremitting aid, that priests in particular were called to carry out this work. He read a long passage about refugees from different parts of the world—Armenia, Mexico, Russia, Poland, Palestine—and how, in each case, regardless of nationality or religion, the church offered safe sanctuary and should continue to show sympathy and every Fatherly regard for pilgrims, aliens, exiles, and migrants of every kind.”

“Luke stopped and looked up and asked if he should go on—there were another few pages. Christopher waved a hand and said, ‘You get the idea.’ They could read the rest later on their own. For now, they should move to the next reading."

"Everyone turned the page. On the next was a passage from The Rule of Saint Benedict. ‘I’m sure,’ Christopher started, ‘you’re all familiar with chapter fifty-three, On the Reception of Guests at the Monastery. Would someone like to read it, please?’”

“Brother Simon raised the page and began to read aloud.”

“’All guests who present themselves are to be welcomed as Christ, for he himself will say: ‘I was a stranger and you welcomed me . . . ’ Great care and concern are to be shown in receiving poor people and pilgrims, because in them more particularly Christ is received.’”

It may be worth noting here that Brad Kessler has done a little slight of hand here in selectively quoting the passage from the Benedictine Code because when read in full, it suggests that the monks are obligated to be hospitable to all but especially to those who share their faith. Benedict also suggests that his monks should pray with the visitor and going further suggests that Christian scriptures should be read.  This of course might be a little complicated if the guest is a Muslim woman who reveres the Qur’an.

Father Christopher continues with his admonitions to the assembled brothers.

“He read a long passage about refugees from different parts of the world—Armenia, Mexico, Russia, Poland, Palestine—and how, in each case, regardless of nationality or religion, the church offered safe sanctuary and should continue to show sympathy and every Fatherly regard for pilgrims, aliens, exiles, and migrants of every kind.”

Brother Christopher reminds his flock of something that Father Edward used to say:  

“Everyone arrives at the monastery because of a shipwreck. They crawl out of the sea like Saint Paul and try to find a Malta at the monastery: a rock to take them in. Sometimes a person stays a week or month. Other times they stay the rest of their life.”

What Father Christopher has to say about the monastic life might also be said about Vermont I suppose: “The problem with living inside a bubble was how easily it could be popped. Every outsider was, potentially, a pin,” Father Christopher muses.

At this point in the novel, the author turns his attention to Sahro’s journey (and a harrowing one it is!). Sahro, we may note, sees everything that happens to her through the lens of her Islamic faith. As noted in the following passage:

“Alone, she felt more exposed than ever. No umbrella or tarp or protection, a woman alone. No father or brother or cousin, only herself in the world. She and her God. But Allah had created her and had a plan for her—that much she knew. No matter what was to come, she was in His hands and there was nothing she could do but pray. For He protected the orphan and traveler. The exile and stranger. Hadn’t the Prophet Himself, Peace Be Upon Him, been an orphan, an exile, a fugitive from his own land? She was following in His footsteps, as all her people had in the qurba joog. And even there, in Panama, in her complete undoing, in the depths of despair, her situation—she knew—was no worse than that of others.”

One is justified in empathizing with this young woman in exile. And yet by the same token, in the background of this story of a woman seeking a better place to live is this older story of a prophet who left his home city of Mecca because of persecution and was received by the people of Medina where he eventually organized a movement that would come to dominate his hosts and eventually lead them to war for his God, Allah. Is it a mistake to forget that? I suspect that most people reading this novel will not even consider what the fundamental differences between Muhammad and Thomas Jefferson are and what the implications of inviting millions of people who may revere Muhammad’s own personal undemocratic political beliefs into the body politic of an already tenuous democracy?

As Sahro tells us of her journey, she reminds the reader that her story is not an isolated one. Millions of other people are making the same journey that she is making. Kessler reminds us of this in the following paragraph:

“Having been in the mountains so long, Sahro was amazed by the number of migrants. They’d seen few people in the mountains, and no immigrants, but here they were everywhere. Young men and boys and women. Salvadorans. Guatemalans. Hondurans. Hundreds in the plaza in town, at the freight yard, men and women sleeping on the train tracks with bags and water bottles. Children even younger than Oscar. They formed little gangs unaccompanied by adults. It shocked and saddened Sahro, and for the first time she wondered: Did anyone have a home anymore? Was everyone in the diaspora? Why were so many people on the road?”

We as readers are left to ask the relevant questions on our own. Is the power of Sahro’s story diluted by the understanding that we are talking about millions of people and not just one? Does Sahro’s story justify the bypassing of legal processes for anyone in the world who wants to come to this land of opportunity to receive sanctuary and a chance at a better life? Should the entire country do what the monks of Father Christopher’s monastery decide to do? Set aside the law or rational deliberate processes?

Eventually, Sahro makes it over the border and immediately requests asylum. She is placed in a detention facility to await her hearing. Over months of waiting, she begins to despair that she will be given a chance for asylum. The author records her thinking in the following words:

“Unlike back home in Africa, where anything could be bought with a bribe and the law only served the powerful, in America people honored the law and were known to be fair and honest. At least that’s what she’d grown up believing. But now in detention, seeing how things really worked, she wasn’t so sure. Maybe America was just like every other place—self-serving, dishonest, a sham.”

Sahro is disillusioned because she had been told, back when she set out on her journey, that America promised citizenship to all who came ready to say the “magic words.” Here is how Kessler records the moment when she enters the U.S. and claims her promised acceptance:

“Then she repeated the words she’d practiced for almost a year, first in Xamar with Aunt Waardo and Uncle Cabdi Rashid and then with Dalmar, and then to herself on many sleepless nights on the road. ‘I am asking for asylum in the United States. I come because I fear for my life in Somalia.’”

Does she understand that ten million other people will be doing the same exact thing and that the country that she seeks to enter created the asylum laws for what it thought would be rare exceptions, not for entire populations of other underperforming economies?

 Here is how Sahro, the main character, experiences America. 

 “Back in the scrublands when she was growing up, her grandfather used to talk about a thing called nuuro. Nuuro was a substance that lay in the soil, that only the goats and camels could detect. Nuuro existed in some pastures and not in others, and the only way for humans to find its presence was to follow the animals and watch where they went. Sometimes a piece of land looked promising, filled with thorn bushes and scrub, but the goats remained undernourished or gave no milk or seemed uneasy there. That was a sign that nuuro was lacking in the soil. Yet in other places—drier, less appealing—the animals thrived. Often when an adult goat went wandering, she was actually looking for nuuro.

Ever since Sahro’s arrival in the United States, she wondered to herself if she’d come to a place lacking nuuro. Lush and green and promising on the exterior but missing an important element within. She hadn’t shared this thought with anyone, not even Waardo or Shirin Kishani. But she’d noticed it the minute she crossed the border into Texas. Something fragile and cold in the air despite the hundred-degree heat. Something shapeless and desolate—the lack of people, the big-box stores. The yellow arches everywhere. Perhaps there was sterility in the soil? Or maybe the history of what had happened to the land after the Europeans came—what they did to the place and the people who lived there before. Or perhaps it was the language they brought with them? A language unrelated to the land, taken from an island in the Atlantic, as unmoored as its people? How could English encompass a landscape it never knew? Americans seemed to have everything, Sahro noticed, but not the most essential thing: a tongue of their own. A lineage. A root. A link to their ancestral home. Maybe that’s why Americans always needed more?”

Sahro thinks of a poem by a Somali refugee living in England: 

i’ve been praying, and these are what my prayers look like—
dear God
i come from two countries
one is thirsty
the other is on fire
both need water.

As Father Christopher and Sahro hike their way to the Canadian border, Sahro concludes the novel by wondering just why it is that Americans have no room for immigrants in this place called Vermont: 

"Birds on wires. A farmhouse with laundry flapping on a line, yellow flowers dotting the lawn. So much open space, she thought. So much land, she couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t let people in, why everyone she knew in detention couldn’t stay. It wasn’t for lack of room; America was so full of room. Just as in Texas, here too—in Vermont—stretched long parcels of unpopulated land. Aside from the abbot and the driver, she hadn’t seen one other person the whole day."

Questions for Comment: Is the question about immigration different when it is asked about single individuals than it is when asked about millions? Or is it the same question? Is the question about immigration different when the immigrant in question plans to come and hold on to all the belief systems that may have contributed to the creation of the circumstances that they are fleeing? Is it wrong for a country to be selective or discriminating about who it does and does not allow into its borders and citizenship?

"It takes a minnow to catch a barracuda, a barracuda to catch a shark.”

A Most Wanted Man REVIEW

Gunter Bachmann runs a counter-terrorism unit in Hamburg, Germany. His stated goals involve making the world a safer place. Those ends justify a lot of skullduggery and manipulation of his assets – assets that he recruits tenaciously. Here is how Gunther describes his work:

“You're looking at me, at us, but we don't exist, not legally, not officially, because German intelligence needs a job to be done that German law won't let it do, so me and my people, we stay small. We stay on the streets. We make the weather. Our sources don't come to us. We find them. We become their friends, their brothers, their fathers, their lovers if we have to. When they're ours, and only then, we direct them at bigger targets. It takes a minnow to catch a barracuda, a barracuda to catch a shark.”

Gunther, it turns out, is good at what he does. In the John LeCarre’s novel the film is based on Gunther justifies all the various ways that he has at his disposal to get his informants to cooperate with his operations. “We don’t ask him to become a traitor,” he says, “We offer him a new definition of loyalty.” In the course of this particular episode in counter-terrorism, Gunther manages to get a son to betray his father, a human rights lawyer to betray her refugee from torture client, and a Muslim philanthropist to betray himself. Gunther’s MO is to always use the pawns to get to the knights and the knights to get to the bishops and the bishops to get to the queen and the queen to get to the king. Gunther understands that most of the characters in that series of dominoes are not evil and not conspiring to do serious damage to the world.

He is after the sharks.

Little does he know that he himself is just a rook in someone else’s game himself – someone who may not have the same noble goals that he has for motive.

Question for Comment: Have you ever betrayed someone, seen someone betrayed, or been betrayed? Do you think you would do well in a job where most of your daily work involved betrayal?  

“I trouped, traveled, loved, lost, trusted and was betrayed.”

Name of the Wind REVIEW

There are many things to enjoy about this novel . . . the ending is not one of them (two sequels are promised apparently). But not all things worth the time you spend on them end well. Relationships and the first installment of a trilogy for example.

The novel came well recommended by both a good friend and my son, but there are two aspects of the novel that I should like to focus my attention on. The first is what this novel has to say about good story telling. The second has to do with how one’s first loves in life can travel with them throughout all their subsequent stories. “The first cut is the deepest,” the singer Rod Stewart tells us. But there can be other deep cuts as well.

The Name of the Wind is a story about Kvothe, a young boy who has the wits to benefit from each and every one of the different educational experiences of his young life. He is the son of a band of troubadours who travels from town-to-town entertaining with music and plays, and from his childhood, he learns much about human psychology, about storytelling, about theater, about affairs of the heart. As a young teenager, he is given the opportunity to be mentored by a gifted “Merlin figure” named “Abenthy” and from him, he learns a great deal about science and math and logic and mystical traditions that amount to learning how to harness natural forces to psychic abilities.

Soon after Abenthy leaves the troupe, Kwothe’s parents are killed and Kwothe is forced to scavenge in the woods and the slums of nearby cities for a number of years, learning what it takes to survive on his own on the streets. In his mid-teens, he gets it into his head that he wants to attend university and so, selling all that he has (not much), he heads off to see if he can talk the university administration into letting him attend on a full scholarship. Connecting himself with a variety of instructors, Kwothe pursues knowledge in the most abstract and practical knowledge the university has to offer. He pursues both mechanical engineering and philosophy as well as biology and anthropology and chemistry and music and whatever else he can make time for. Kvothe is what one might call an “autodidact” – he is a voracious learner, just as capable of learning to design mechanical contraptions as learning to make effective arguments, slaying dragons, or performing concerts with his lute.   

“I went to learn magic of the sort they talk about in stories,” Kwothe says of his decision to pursue formal education at the university,

“Magic like Taborlin the Great. I wanted to learn the name of the wind. I wanted fire and lightning. I wanted answers to ten thousand questions and access to their archives.”

One of the things I like about this novel is the way that the character of Kwothe models what it means to be a learner. Most of the novel amounts to Kwothe telling the story of his learning-life to a “chronicler” – a story that like any good story - involves a young boy dealing with tragedy who falls in love, loses love, and surmounts one challenge after another until it is finally time to tell the story.

Here is some of the advice the novel has to contribute about storytelling.

“First, ask yourself if you can tell the whole thing in one breath. If so, what does it sound like?” Kwothe asks Chronicler about the way he thinks about his life story being told - and then replies to his own question: “I trouped, traveled, loved, lost, trusted and was betrayed.” “Write that down and burn it for all the good it will do you," he adds.  But Chronicler intends to get the story in full with all its details and so Kwothe asks him how he generally goes about writing someone else’s story. “Chronicler shrugged,”

 “Most simply tell me what they remember. Later, I record events in the proper order, remove the unnecessary pieces, clarify, simplify, that sort of thing.”

Kvothe reminds Chronicler that he is, himself, no stranger to the arts of storytelling:

“Kvothe leaned forward in his chair. ‘Before we begin, you must remember that I am of the Edema Ruh. We were telling stories before Caluptena burned. Before there were books to write in. Before there was music to play. When the first fire kindled, we Ruh were there spinning stories in the circle of its flickering light.’”

Storytelling, he reminds Chronicler, is the most ancient of all arts.

“The innkeeper nodded to the scribe. ‘I know your reputation as a great collector of stories and recorder of events.’ Kvothe’s eyes became hard as flint, sharp as broken glass. ‘That said, do not presume to change a word of what I say. If I seem to wander, if I seem to stray, remember that true stories seldom take the straightest way.’”

For this reason, a few sentences after Kwothe has started to tell his tale, he has to digress. At first, he thought that the story could begin at the university but then he realizes that his story began long before that, back in the misty but painful traumas of his childhood.

At one point in time, Kwothe meets a gifted storyteller by the name of Skarpi who tells him “that all stories are true even if only some really happened . . . more or less.” 

Skarpi tells Kwothe, “You have to be a bit of a liar to tell a story the right way,” adding for good measure that “too much truth confuses the facts” and “too much honesty makes you sound insincere.” “That's why stories appeal to us,” we are later told by the author, “They give us the clarity and simplicity our real lives lack.”

When Kwothe’s storytelling is over for the day at the end of the novel, the author uses one of the other characters to remind us that “true stories have unpleasant parts.” And Kwothe’s has “more than most.” He suggests that most stories based on the lives of real people are “messy, and tangled.”

. . . and they do not always end well.

This is where we have to speak of “the woman” 

“What does our story need? What vital element is it lacking?” Kwothe asks after spending several chapters on his childhood.

“Women, Reshi [Kwothe’s nickname],” Bast said immediately. “There’s a real paucity of women.”

Kvothe smiles. “Not women, Bast,” he says, “A woman. The woman.” “. . . Let me say one thing before I start,” he adds.

“I’ve told stories in the past, painted pictures with words, told hard lies and harder truths. Once, I sang colors to a blind man. Seven hours I played, but at the end he said he saw them, green and red and gold. That, I think, was easier than this. Trying to make you understand her with nothing more than words. You have never seen her, never heard her voice. You cannot know. But still, I will try.”

Kwothe’s mysterious first love is a teenage girl he met while in a caravan on his way to the University. Her name was Denna (real name Diana) and it would be many months later before he met her again. But he never forgot that first encounter on that fateful caravan trip. “If you can find someone like that,” he will later say of her, “someone who you can hold and close your eyes to the world with, then you're lucky. Even if it only lasts for a minute or a day.”

Kwothe is a fluid and articulate storyteller but when he is asked to describe Denna and what Denna meant to him, words always fail him. But here is what he says when he tries:

“As with all truly wild things, care is necessary in approaching them. Stealth is useless. Wild things recognize stealth for what it is, a lie and a trap. While wild things might play games of stealth, and in doing so may even occasionally fall prey to stealth, they are never truly caught by it.”

“So, with slow care rather than stealth we must approach the subject of a certain woman. . . . I fear approaching her too quickly even in a story.”

“No matter where she stood, she was in the center of the room. Do not misunderstand, she was not loud or vain. We stare at the fire because it flickers, because it glows. The light is what catches our eyes but what makes a man lean close to the fire has nothing to do with its bright shape. What draws you to a fire is a warmth you feel when you come near. The same is true of Denna.”

“ In what manner was she beautiful? I realize that I cannot say enough. So, since I cannot say enough, at least I will avoid saying too much.”

“Say this, that she was dark haired. There. It was long and straight. She was dark of eye and fair complected. There. Her face was oval, her jaw strong and delicate. Say that she was poised and graceful. There.”

“Kvothe took a breath before continuing. ‘Finally, say that she was beautiful. That is all that can be well said. That she was beautiful, through to her bones, despite any flaw or fault. She was beautiful, to Kvothe at least. At least? To Kvothe she was most beautiful.’ For a moment Kvothe tensed as if he would leap up and tear this sheet away from Chronicler as well.”

“Then he relaxed, like a sail when the wind leaves it. ‘But to be honest, it must be said that she was beautiful to others as well…’”

The Following Comes from Chapter 33 (“A Sea of Stars”) and gives us Kwothe’s recollection of Denna when he first met her as a 15-year-old.

“She arched an eyebrow, looking ten years older. ‘So certain.’ She smiled and was suddenly young again. ‘How does it feel to know where you are going?’

“I couldn't think of a reply, but was saved from the need for one by Reta calling us for supper. Denna and I walked toward the campfire, together.”

“The beginning of the next day was spent in a brief, awkward courtship. Eager, but not wanting to seem eager, I made a slow dance around Denna before finally finding some excuse to spend time with her.”

“Denna, on the other hand, seemed perfectly at ease. We spent the rest of the day as if we were old friends. We joked and told stories. I pointed out the different types of clouds and what they told of the weather to come. She showed me the shapes they held: a rose, a harp, a waterfall.”

“So passed the day. Later, when lots were being drawn to see who had which turn at watch, Denna and I drew the first two shifts. Without discussing it, we shared the four hours of watch together. Talking softly so as to not wake the others, we sat close by the fire and spent the time watching very little but each other.”

“The third day was much the same. We passed the time pleasantly, not in long conversation, but more often watching the scenery, saying whatever happened to come to our minds. That night we stopped at a wayside inn where Reta bought fodder for the horses and a few other supplies.”

“Reta retired early with her husband, telling each of us that she'd arranged for our dinners and beds with the innkeeper. The former was quite good, bacon and potato soup with fresh bread and butter. The latter was in the stables, but it was still a long sight better than what I was used to in Tarbean.”

“The common room smelled of smoke and sweat and spilled beer. I was glad when Denna asked if I wanted to take a walk. Outside was the warm quiet of a windless spring night. We talked as we wended our slow way through the wild bit of forest behind the inn. After a while we came to a wide clearing circling a pond.”

“On the edge of the water were a pair of waystones, their surfaces silver against the black of the sky, the black of the water. One stood upright, a finger pointing to the sky. The other lay flat, extending into the water like a short stone pier.”

“No breath of wind disturbed the surface of the water. So as we climbed out onto the fallen stone the stars reflected themselves in double fashion; as above, so below. It was as if we were sitting amid a sea of stars.”

“We spoke for hours, late into the night. Neither of us mentioned our pasts. I sensed that there were things she would rather not talk about, and by the way she avoided questioning me, I think she guessed the same. We spoke of ourselves instead, of fond imaginings and impossible things. I pointed to the skies and told her the names of stars and constellations. She told me stories about them I had never heard before.”

“My eyes were always returning to Denna. She sat beside me, arms hugging her knees. Her skin was more luminous than the moon, her eyes wider than the sky, deeper than the water, darker than the night.”

“It slowly began to dawn on me that I had been staring at her wordlessly for an impossible amount of time. Lost in my thoughts, lost in the sight of her. But her face didn't look offended or amused. It almost looked as if she were studying the lines of my face, almost as if she were waiting.”

“I wanted to take her hand. I wanted to brush her cheek with my fingertips. I wanted to tell her that she was the first beautiful thing I had seen in three years. That the sight of her yawning to the back of her hand was enough to drive the breath from me. How I sometimes lost the sense of her words in the sweet fluting of her voice. I wanted to say that if she were with me then somehow nothing could ever be wrong for me again.”

“In that breathless second, I almost asked her. I felt the question boiling up from my chest. I remember drawing a breath then hesitating-what could I say? Come away with me? Stay with me? Come to the University? No. Sudden certainty tightened in my chest like a cold fist. What could I ask her? What could I offer? Nothing. Anything I said would sound foolish, a child's fantasy. I closed my mouth and looked across the water. Inches away, Denna did the same. I could feel the heat of her. She smelled like road dust, and honey, and the smell the air holds seconds before a heavy summer rain.”

“Neither of us spoke. I closed my eyes. The closeness of her was the sweetest, sharpest thing my life had ever known.”

https://www.lingq.com/en/learn-english-online/courses/214195/33-630641/

Developmental psychologists tell us that there is something uniquely sharp about the memories that we make as teenagers. The adolescent brain experiences the world with more clarity (even the inaccurate things are clearer) and feels more intently about what it perceives (even if those feelings are transient). Patrick Rothfuss has captured this psychic experience of first love quite masterfully here. Even though it will be some time before Kwothe sees Denna again, it is as though the feelings of this starry night are imprinted upon his mind like a baby duckling is imprinted by its mother.

Many years later, Kwothe meets Denna again and again, he is struck by just how impossible she is to describe. His storytelling skills fail him.  “I was too stunned to speak,” he tells Chronicler. “I could not have said a sensible word to save my life.”

“She smiled at me then. It was warm and sweet and shy, like a flower unfurling. It was friendly and honest and slightly embarrassed. When she smiled at me, I felt…”

“I honestly cannot think of how I could describe it. Lying would be easier. I could steal from a hundred stories and tell you a lie so familiar you would swallow it whole. I could say my knees went to rubber. That my breath came hard in my chest. But that would not be the truth. My heart did not pound or stop or stutter. That is the sort of thing they say happens in stories. Foolishness. Hyperbole. Tripe. But still…”

“Go out in the early days of winter, after the first cold snap of the season. Find a pool of water with a sheet of ice across the top, still fresh and new and clear as glass. Near the shore the ice will hold you. Slide out farther. Farther. Eventually you'll find the place where the surface just barely bears your weight. There you will feel what I felt. The ice splinters under your feet. Look down and you can see the white cracks darting through the ice like mad, elaborate spiderwebs. It is perfectly silent, but you can feel the sudden sharp vibrations through the bottoms of your feet.”

“That is what happened when Denna smiled at me. I don't mean to imply I felt as if I stood on brittle ice about to give way beneath me. No. I felt like the ice itself, suddenly shattered, with cracks spiraling out from where she had touched my chest. The only reason I held together was because my thousand pieces were all leaning together. If I moved, I feared I would fall apart.”

“Perhaps it is enough to say that I was caught by a smile. And though that sounds as if it came from a storybook, it is very near the truth.”

“Words have never been difficult for me. Quite the opposite in fact-often I find it all too easy to speak my mind, and things go badly because of it. However, here in front of Denna, I was too stunned to speak. I could not have said a sensible word to save my life.”

“Without thinking, all the courtly manners my mother had drilled into me came to the fore. I reached out smoothly and clasped Denna's outstretched hand in my own, as if she'd offered it to me. Then I took a half step backward and made a genteel three-quarter bow. At the same time my free hand caught hold of the edge of my cloak and tucked it behind my back. It was a flattering bow, courtly without being ridiculously formal, and safe for a public setting such as this.”

“What next? A kiss on the hand was traditional, but what sort of kiss was appropriate? In Atur you merely nod over the hand. Cealdish ladies like the moneylender's daughter I had chatted with earlier expected you to brush the knuckles lightly and make a kissing sound. In Modeg you actually press your lips to the back of your own thumb.”

“But we were in Commonwealth, and Denna showed no foreign accent. A straightforward kiss then. I pressed my lips gently to the back of her hand for the space of time it takes to draw a quick breath. Her skin was warm and smelled vaguely of heather.”

“‘I am at your service, my lady,’ I said, standing and releasing her hand. For the first time in my life I understood the true purpose of this sort of formal greeting. It gives you a script to follow when you have absolutely no idea what to say.”

“‘My lady?’ Denna echoed, sounding a little surprised. ‘Very well, if you insist.’ She took hold of her dress with one hand and bobbed a curtsey, somehow managing to make it look graceful and mocking and playful all at once. ‘Your lady.’ Hearing her voice, I knew my suspicions were true. She was my Aloine.”

https://www.lingq.com/en/learn-english-online/courses/214195/58-630719/

Many things will happen in Kwothe’s life between this moment of reunion and when they will again get a chance to talk. As noted earlier, real stories do not follow a straight line. At a crucial moment in the story of Kwothe and Denna, they had planned to meet and talk. But a fire broke out in the shop where Kwothe was working that day, and he dutifully saved a classmate’s life and missed the meeting. For several days later, he went back to see if he could find her to apologize and on his last trip to the place where they were to meet, the girl that he had saved came up to him to thank him and express her gratitude and Denna saw from a distance and misinterpreted and . . . that was that.

Until years later when they met again.

“She leaned forward to touch my hand in a consoling way. She smelled of strawberry, and her lips were a dangerous red even in the moonlight. ‘How well I knew you, even then.’ We talked through the long hours of night. I spoke subtle circles around the way I felt, not wanting to be overbold. I thought she might be doing the same, but I could never be sure. It was like we were doing one of those elaborate Modegan court dances, where the partners stand scant inches apart, but—if they are skilled—never touch. Such was our conversation. But not only were we lacking touch to guide us, it was as if we were also strangely deaf. So we danced very carefully, unsure what music the other was listening to, unsure, perhaps, if the other was dancing at all.”

Without ruining the story for you, when Kwothe wraps up this phase of his story, he stands on the outside of Denna’s life watching as one man after another shipwrecks their hearts falling for Denna.

Deoch, one of Kwothe’s mentors gives him this advice.

 “You see, women are like fires, like flame. Some women are like candles, bright and friendly. Some are like single sparks or embers, like fireflies for chasing on summer nights. Some are like camp fires all light and heat for a night and willing to be left afterward. Some women are like hearth fires, not much to look at, but underneath they are all warm red coals that burn a long, long while. But Dianne…, Dianne is like a waterfall of sparks pouring off a sharp iron edge that god is holding to the grindstone. You can’t help but look and help but want it. You might even put your hand to it for a second but you cant hold it. She will break your heart.”

“How young I was,” Kwothe tells Chronicler, “How foolish. How wise.”

 OF all of Denna’s many suitors, Kwothe has this to say:

“They knew she was leaving, and they didn't know why. So they clutched at her like shipwrecked sailors, clinging to the rocks despite the fact that they are being battered to death against them. I almost felt sorry for them. ” . . . “I have known her longer . . . and after she has left you I will still be here making her laugh.”

“I will still be here long after she has forgotten your name. They were quiet tears for herself, because there was something inside her that was badly hurt. I couldn't tell what it was and didn't dare to ask. Instead, I simply said what I could to take the pain away and helped her shut her eyes against the world.”

“I am one of her few friends . . . I will not be one of the cow-eyed suitors . . .”

“Denna is not wicked or mean or spiteful,” Kwothe insists, but “She is cruel.”   

Question for Comment: What part does a first love play in the adventurous story of your life?

Seeing Like a State

Seeing Like a State REVIEW

Thanks to my son Skyler for recommending this one.

“They said . . . that he was so devoted to Pure Science . . . that he would rather have people die by the right therapy than be cured by the wrong.” — Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith

Distilling the argument of James Scott’s book, Seeing Like a State is not difficult but capturing the power of the argument will not be easy. The subject of the book is something that Scott calls “High Modernism.” The conclusion of the book is that Scott is not a fan of it. Indeed, He thinks it dangerous to human well-being. Scott writes:

“High modernism must not be confused with scientific practice. It was fundamentally, as the term “ideology” implies, a faith that borrowed, as it were, the legitimacy of science and technology. It was, accordingly, uncritical, unskeptical, and thus unscientifically optimistic about the possibilities for the comprehensive planning of human settlement and production. The carriers of high modernism tended to see rational order in remarkably visual aesthetic terms. For them, an efficient, rationally organized city, village, or farm was a city that looked regimented and orderly in a geometrical sense.”

And later:

“The fact that [their maps] look right becomes more important than whether they work.”

In short, Scott argues that States (and large institutions) will often try to condense and simplify information about the people and land they govern so as to better make decisions about it from a distance. Because the State or the management has a particular agenda or desired outcome, they prefer maps that give them information about those matters directly relevant to their interests. And because the management class is not inclined to get mosquito bit or boot-soiled by spending time in those places that it governs, it tends to not realize it when the map no longer actually represents the territory. When autocratic power is wed to a simplified map, systems will only work as long as those who live in “reality” are allowed to defy the state or the management by working in the unauthorized shadows of common sense.

Scott argues that administrators of the high modernist bent are satisfied when their realms look ordered and look like they conform to the map. Thus, they will use power to make reality conform to representation even when “reality objects.” The thesis of the book is not blurry.

“My case is that certain kinds of states, driven by utopian plans and an authoritarian disregard for the values, desires, and objections of their subjects, are indeed a mortal threat to human well-being.”

Scott carries his argument by organizing a phalanx of historical illustrations. These include but are not limited to the attempts of German forestry to micro-manage forests “scientifically”; the attempts of French city planners to redesign Paris and to build Brazillia; the attempts of the Socialist State to collectivize agriculture; and the attempts of the Tanzanian government to relocate its population to planned villages. Scores of other illustrations (including the attempt to control language itself) are also provided to make it clear that this tendency of the high modernist approach is not something isolated to specific cultures. It happens everywhere and all the time.

Let’s take some excerpts from these various illustrations. Scott begins by talking about scientific forestry in Germany. At one point in time, the German government decided to organize and harness its forests in the same way that it might its armies. The results were catastrophic. Scott writes the following of this short-sighted, state and “science” backed endeavor in “dollar-godded utilitariansm”:

“The best way to appreciate how heroic was this constriction of vision is to notice what fell outside its field of vision. Lurking behind the number indicating revenue yield were not so much forests as commercial wood, representing so many thousands of board feet of saleable timber and so many cords of firewood fetching a certain price. Missing, of course, were all those trees, bushes, and plants holding little or no potential for state revenue. Missing as well were all those parts of trees, even revenue-bearing trees, which might have been useful to the population but whose value could not be converted into fiscal receipts. Here I have in mind foliage and its uses as fodder and thatch; fruits, as food for people and domestic animals; twigs and branches, as bedding, fencing, hop poles, and kindling; bark and roots, for making medicines and for tanning; sap, for making resins; and so forth. Each species of tree—indeed, each part or growth stage of each species—had its unique properties and uses. A fragment of the entry under “elm” in a popular seventeenth-century encyclopedia on arboriculture conveys something of the vast range of practical uses to which the tree could be put.”

“Elm is a timber of most singular use, especially whereby it may be continually dry, or wet, in extremes; therefore proper for water works, mills, the ladles and soles of the wheel, pumps, aqueducts, ship planks below the water line, ... also for wheelwrights, handles for the single handsaw, rails and gates. Elm is not so apt to rive [split] ... and is used for chopping blocks, blocks for the hat maker, trunks and boxes to be covered with leather, coffins and dressers and shovelboard tables of great length; also for the carver and those curious workers of fruitage, foliage, shields, statues and most of the ornaments appertaining to the orders of architecture.... And finally ... the use of the very leaves of this tree, especially the female, is not to be despised, ... for they will prove of great relief to cattle in the winter and scorching summers when hay and fodder is dear.... The green leaf of the elms contused heals a green wound or cut, and boiled with the bark, consolidates bone fractures.”

“In state “fiscal forestry,” however, the actual tree with its vast number of possible uses was replaced by an abstract tree representing a volume of lumber or firewood. If the princely conception of the forest was still utilitarian, it was surely a utilitarianism confined to the direct needs of the state.”

“From a naturalist’s perspective, nearly everything was missing from the state’s narrow frame of reference. Gone was the vast majority of flora: grasses, flowers, lichens, ferns, mosses, shrubs, and vines. Gone, too, were reptiles, birds, amphibians, and innumerable species of insects. Gone were most species of fauna, except those that interested the crown’s gamekeepers.”

“From an anthropologist’s perspective, nearly everything touching on human interaction with the forest was also missing from the state’s tunnel vision. The state did pay attention to poaching, which impinged on its claim to revenue in wood or its claim to royal game, but otherwise it typically ignored the vast, complex, and negotiated social uses of the forest for hunting and gathering, pasturage, fishing, charcoal making, trapping, and collecting food and valuable minerals as well as the forest’s significance for magic, worship, refuge, and so on.”

“. . . If the utilitarian state could not see the real, existing forest for the (commercial) trees, if its view of its forests was abstract and partial, it was hardly unique in this respect. Some level of abstraction is necessary for virtually all forms of analysis, and it is not at all surprising that the abstractions of state officials should have reflected the paramount fiscal interests of their employer. The entry under “forest” in Diderot’s Encyclopédie is almost exclusively concerned with the utilité publique of forest products and the taxes, revenues, and profits that they can be made to yield. The forest as a habitat disappears and is replaced by the forest as an economic resource to be managed efficiently and profitably. Here, fiscal and commercial logics coincide; they are both resolutely fixed on the bottom line.”

Scott goes on to suggest that the German State’s attempt to simplify led to a veritable vocabulary that spelled doom for the plan it spoke of’s ultimate success:

“The vocabulary used to organize nature typically betrays the overriding interests of its human users. In fact, utilitarian discourse replaces the term “nature” with the term “natural resources,” focusing on those aspects of nature that can be appropriated for human use. A comparable logic extracts from a more generalized natural world those flora or fauna that are of utilitarian value (usually marketable commodities) and, in turn, reclassifies those species that compete with, prey on, or otherwise diminish the yields of the valued species. Thus, plants that are valued become “crops,” the species that compete with them are stigmatized as “weeds,” and the insects that ingest them are stigmatized as “pests.” Thus, trees that are valued become “timber,” while species that compete with them become “trash” trees or “underbrush.” The same logic applies to fauna. Highly valued animals become “game” or “livestock,” while those animals that compete with or prey upon them become “predators” or “varmints.”

Thus Scott concludes: “The German forest became the archetype for imposing on disorderly nature the neatly arranged constructs of science.”

Administrative officers who were well-read and well-educated in scientific forestry while being completely disconnected from anything but representations of forests went about destroying the actual forest in the hubristic belief that maps are territories.

“In the German case, the negative biological and ultimately commercial consequences of the stripped-down forest became painfully obvious only after the second rotation of conifers had been planted. “It took about one century for them [the negative consequences] to show up clearly.”

Scott quotes Herbert Simon in support of his conclusions, referring to something he calls “administrative man” [administrativus homo]:

“Administrative man recognizes that the world he perceives is a drastically simplified model of the buzzing, blooming confusion that constitutes the real world. He is content with the gross simplification because he believes that the real world is mostly empty—that most of the facts of the real world have no great relevance to any particular situation he is facing and that most significant chains of causes and consequences are short and simple.” — Herbert Simon

Scott notes that it is not simply that State and institutional maps are too simple to be useful in the long term, they are, he insists, too temporary. They assume somehow that nature is not evolving and changing and that the map, even the simplified map, is out of sync with reality by the time the ink is dry. Furthermore, the State’s simplification fails to take into consideration that the people who have a stake in the actual decisions will resist the enforcement of policies that are based on a State’s mythological representation. Scott includes a discussion of how high modernism intersects with French tax policy:

“The door-and-window tax established in France under the Directory and abolished only in 1917 is a striking case in point. Its originator must have reasoned that the number of windows and doors in a dwelling was proportional to the dwelling’s size. Thus a tax assessor need not enter the house or measure it but merely count the doors and windows. As a simple, workable formula, it was a brilliant stroke, but it was not without consequences. Peasant dwellings were subsequently designed or renovated with the formula in mind so as to have as few openings as possible. While the fiscal losses could be recouped by raising the tax per opening, the long-term effects on the health of the rural population lasted for more than a century.”

“We must keep in mind not only the capacity of state simplifications to transform the world but also the capacity of the society to modify, subvert, block, and even overturn the categories imposed upon it. Here it is useful to distinguish what might be called facts on paper from facts on the ground.”

Scott’s book contains dire warnings that we would do well to heed:

“I believe that many of the most tragic episodes of state development in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries originate in a particularly pernicious combination of three elements. The first is the aspiration to the administrative ordering of nature and society, an aspiration that we have already seen at work in scientific forestry, but one raised to a far more comprehensive and ambitious level. “High modernism” seems an appropriate term for this aspiration. . . . As a conviction, high modernism was not the exclusive property of any political tendency; it had both right- and left-wing variants, as we shall see. The second element is the unrestrained use of the power of the modern state as an instrument for achieving these designs. The third element is a weakened or prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans.”

In this sense, Scott’s book is a call to resist the imposition of the State and its “scientific” experts if those experts have constructed their beliefs about reality from reading and thinking alone. The author suggests that there will always be those who approach their administrative work with the spirit of “high modernism.” For some, their preference would be to tear the entire system down so that it can be rebuilt to their utopian vision. Scott’s chapter on the human destruction caused by some of these high modernist city planners is undeniable evidence:“Only those who have the scientific knowledge to discern and create this superior social order are fit to rule in the new age’ the high modernist insists:

“Further, those who through retrograde ignorance refuse to yield to the scientific plan need to be educated to its benefits or else swept aside. Strong versions of high modernism, such as those held by Lenin and Le Corbusier, cultivated an Olympian ruthlessness toward the subjects of their interventions. At its most radical, high modernism imagined wiping the slate utterly clean and beginning from zero.”

“Le Corbusier had no patience for the physical environment that centuries of urban living had created. . . . Le Corbusier set himself the task of inventing the ideal industrial city, in which the ‘general truths’ behind the machine age would be expressed with graphic simplicity. The rigor and unity of this ideal city required that it make as few concessions as possible to the history of existing cities. ‘We must refuse to afford even the slightest concession to what is: to the mess we are in now,’ he wrote. ‘There is no solution to be found there.’ Instead, his new city would preferably rise on a cleared site as a single, integrated urban composition. . . . People may complain, he noted, that in reality streets intersect at all sorts of angles and that the variations are infinite. ‘But,’ he replied, ‘that’s precisely the point. I eliminate all those things. That’s my starting point.... I insist on right-angled intersections.’”

I can only imagine how badly a city like this would serve people if built in Vermont with its rivers, mountains, quarries, swamps, glacial debris, lakes, soil and climate differences, and historical settlement patterns, etc. Scott spends a good deal of time on the French city planner Le Corbusier because he is such a caricature of the “high modernist” type and of that sort of administrator’s preference for a “dictatorship of ‘The PLAN.’”  

 “The centralization required by Le Corbusier’s doctrine of the Plan (always capitalized in his usage) is replicated by the centralization of the city itself. Functional segregation was joined to hierarchy. His city was a ‘monocephalic’ [only one head] city, its centrally located core performing the “higher” functions of the metropolitan area.”

“The business center issues commands; it does not suggest, much less consult,” Le Corbusier writes,

“The despot is not a man. It is the Plan. The correct, realistic, exact plan, the one that will provide your solution once the problem has been posited clearly, in its entirety, in its indispensable harmony. This plan has been drawn up well away from the frenzy in the mayor’s office or the town hall, from the cries of the electorate or the laments of society’s victims. It has been drawn up by serene and lucid minds. It has taken account of nothing but human truths. It has ignored all current regulations, all existing usages, and channels. It has not considered whether or not it could be carried out with the constitution now in force. It is a biological creation destined for human beings and capable of realization by modern techniques.”

Scott calls this “the dictatorship of the planner.” He then goes about showing just what an unlivable place a person like Le Corbusier creates when he designs a city like Brazillia,

 “Although it was surely a rational, healthy, rather egalitarian, state-created city, its plans made not the slightest concession to the desires, history, and practices of its residents. In some important respects, Brasília is to São Paulo or Rio as scientific forestry is to the unplanned forest. Both plans are highly legible, planned simplifications devised to create an efficient order that can be monitored and directed from above.”

Scott calls Le Corbusier’s planned city, “authoritarian planning as urban taxidermy.” He contrasts Le Corbusier with one of his more vocal critics,

She [Jacobs] contrasts the “art” of the planner to the practical conduct of daily life”

“But when it comes to urban public policy, she thinks planning ought not to usurp this unplanned city: “The main responsibility of city planning and design should be to develop, insofar as public policy and action can do so, cities that are congenial places for this great range of unofficial plans, ideas, and opportunities to flourish.”

“For Jacobs, how a city develops is something like how a language evolves. A language is the joint historical creation of millions of speakers. Although all speakers have some effect on the trajectory of a language, the process is not particularly egalitarian. Linguists, grammarians, and educators, some of them backed by the power of the state, weigh in heavily. But the process is not particularly amenable to a dictatorship, either. Despite the efforts toward “central planning,” language (especially its everyday spoken form) stubbornly tends to go on its own rich, multivalent, colorful way. Similarly, despite the attempts by urban planners toward designing and stabilizing the city, it escapes their grasp; it is always being reinvented and inflected by its inhabitants. For both a large city and a rich language, this openness, plasticity, and diversity allow them to serve an endless variety of purposes—many of which have yet to be conceived.” 

Scott again draws on other authors to make his point, in this case one who refers to cities planned by bookish elites as “thin cities” and cities created organically by the people living in them as “thick cities.”

“Only time and the work of millions of its residents can turn these thin cities into thick cities. The grave shortcoming of a planned city is that it not only fails to respect the autonomous purposes and subjectivity of those who live in it but also fails to allow sufficiently for the contingency of the interaction between its inhabitants and what that produces.”— Zygmunt Bauman, “Living Without an Alternative

The author moves on to a chapter in the ways that Soviet “high modernists” went about destroying the world that they hoped to “utopianize.”

“What the party has is the blueprint of the entire new structure, which its scientific insight has made possible. The role of the workers is to follow that part of the blueprint allotted to them in the confidence that the architects of revolution know what they are doing.” – Lenin

“For Lenin, the totality was exclusively in the hands of the vanguard party, which had a virtual monopoly of knowledge. He imagined an all-seeing center—an eye in the sky, as it were—which formed the basis for strictly hierarchical operations in which the proletariat became mere foot soldiers or pawns.”

Scott elaborates upon Lenin’s destructive high modernism and upon his dissenters [Kollontay and Luxemburg] who tried to oppose it. The following quote comes from Prudhon, and describes the ever autocratic “style” of the Soviet high modernists (one that Solzhenitsyn will later echo):

 “To be ruled is to be kept an eye on, inspected, spied on, regulated, indoctrinated, sermonized, listed and checked off, estimated, appraised, censured, ordered about.... To be ruled is at every operation, transaction, movement, to be noted, registered, counted, priced, admonished, prevented, reformed, redressed, corrected.”

This is what high modernist states must do if they intend to squeeze the territory into the map.

I think my favorite example of the high modernist error comes from Scott’s discussion of the French education system under a high modernist administration:

“The most legible educational system would resemble Hippolyte Taine’s description of French education in the nineteenth century, when ‘the Minister of Education could pride himself, just by looking at his watch, which page of Virgil all schoolboys of the Empire were annotating at that exact moment.’”

The book moves on to a discussion of Nyerere’s decision in Tanzania to relocate everyone in the country to planned villages. Echoing the arguments he has made in previous contexts, Scott makes the case that high modernist ideals went about systematically destroying a culture that had its own logic, developed from hundreds of years of tradition.

“What is significant, however, is that the modern planned village in Tanzania was essentially a point-by-point negation of existing rural practice, which included shifting cultivation and pastoralism; polycropping; living well off the main roads; kinship and lineage authority; small, scattered settlements with houses built higgledy-piggledy; and production that was dispersed and opaque to the state. The logic of this negation seemed often to prevail over sound ecological or economic considerations.”

““In their perfect legibility and sameness, these villages would be ideal, substitutable bricks in an edifice of state plan­ning,” Scott writes, “Whether they would function was another matter.”

Scott gives another lovely illustration of the problems created by “high modernist planning” when he speaks of the way that French taxi drivers sometime respond to regulations by something they call a “work-to-rule strike.” In one of these protests, all the taxi drivers agree to actually live by the regulations by the laws, and thereby bringing the city’s traffic flows to a grinding halt.

“The pretense of authoritarian high-modernist schemes to discipline virtually everything within their ambit is bound to encounter intractable resistance,” Scott writes. Things in high modernists state only work in so far as the people whose lives are actually impacted find ways to resist on the sly (what Scott calls “social inertia).

“One all-but-guaranteed consequence of such thin planning is that the planned institution generates an unofficial reality— a ‘dark twin’— that arises to perform m any of the various needs that the planned institution fails to fulfill. . . . Nearly every new, exemplary capital city has, as the inevitable accompaniment of its official structures, given rise to another, far more ‘disorderly’ and complex city that makes the official city work— that is virtually a condition of its existence. That is, the dark twin is not just an anomaly, an ‘outlaw reality’; it represents the activity and life without which the official city would cease to function. On a more speculative note, I imagine that the greater the pretense of and insistence on an officially decreed micro-order, the greater the volume of nonconforming practices necessary to sustain that fiction. The most rigidly planned economies tend to be accompanied by large ‘underground, ‘gray,’ informal,’ economies that supply, in a thousand ways, what the formal economy fails to supply. When this economy is ruthlessly suppressed, the cost has often been economic ruin and starvation.”

Scott wraps up his argument with an extended discussion of the Greek word metis. It is a word that describes the sort of knowledge that comes from local experimentation. What we might call, “street smarts.”

“Like language, the metis or local knowledge necessary to the successful practice of farming or pastoralism is probably best learned by daily practice and experience. Like serving a long apprenticeship, growing up in a household where that craft is continually practiced often represents the most satisfactory preparation for its exercise. This kind of socialization to a trade may favor the conservation of skills rather than daring innovation. But any formula that excludes or suppresses the experience, knowledge, and adaptability of metis risks incoherence and failure.”

Scott illustrates metis with the following interview excerpt with a machine operator who draws an analogy between running his machine and driving a car:

“Cars are basically the same but every car is different.. . . At first when you’re learning, you just learn rules about driving. But as you get to know how to drive, you get a feel for the car you're driving— you know, things like how it feels at different speeds, how well the brakes work, when it's going to overheat, how to start it when it’s cold. . . . Then if you think about old cars like these machines, been running three shifts for twenty years, some of them , like maybe you’ve got a car with no horn, that w ants to turn right when you hit the brake, that don’t start right unless you pump the gas in a certain way— then maybe you see what it's like trying to run these old machines they've got down here.””

The high modernist prefers the knowledge that comes out of tightly controlled scientific experience. They prefer reading the machine manual and assume that the manual is the machine. The proponent of metis argues that nowhere in this world we actually live in do we find controlled environments. We live and work in complex worlds, not laboratories. This is a “wicked world” where no two times and places are alike - not a “kind world” – where uniformity can lead to predictability.  “What is perhaps most striking about high-modernist schemes, despite their quite genuine egalitarian and often socialist impulses,” Scott writes: “is how little confidence they repose in the skills, intelligence, and experience of ordinary people.”

In his concluding remarks, Scott puts his finger on the problem of high modernism:

“If I were asked to condense the reasons behind these failures into a single sentence, I would say that the progenitors of such plans regarded themselves as far smarter and farseeing than they really were and, at the same time, regarded their subjects as far more stupid and incompetent than they really were.”

No doubt, Scott will be accused of aiding and abetting the “anti-intellectualists” – the vaccine deniers – the Wuhan conspiracists, and the people who are not yet ready to buy electric cars.

We shall see.

Question for Comment: Have you ever experienced “high modernism” in the places where you have lived and worked?