The Wandering Starts Again…

In a week! I’m in Boston just for another week before I head off again, this time down South.

Here’s the South, according to Wikipedia:

The Southern United States—commonly referred to as the American South, Dixie, Down South, or simply the South—constitutes a large distinctive region in the southeastern and south-central United States. Because of the region’s unique cultural and historic heritage, including Native Americans, early European settlements of Spanish, English, French, Scotch-Irish, Scottish, and German heritage,^[4] importation of hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans, growth of a large proportion of African Americans in the population, reliance on slave labor, and legacy of the Confederacy after the American Civil War, the South developed its own customs, literature, musical styles, and varied cuisines that have profoundly shaped traditional American culture.

Again, I’m getting quite a few handful of “What?? Why??”s from the good people of the Northeast… though it’s all more or less jokey. My answer, as usual, is “Cos I want to see it myself!”

So, the itinerary so far is Boston > New York City >Washington, DC > Chattanooga, TN (I’m going to Sewanee university) > Atlanta, GA > TEXAS (yes, I know there are a lot of cities in Texas, I’m not sure where exactly I’m going first)

New York: What Next?

RABBITS are supposed to be easy to kill. The French dispatch them with a sharp knife to the throat. A farmer in upstate New York swears that a swift smack with the side of the hand works. Others prefer a quick twist of the neck.

It didn’t seem so easy at the rabbit-killing seminar held in a parking lot behind Roberta’s restaurant in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn in November.
full article at the New York Times


Slide Show
Recipe: Rabbit Loin with Bitter Greens

Recipe: Tuscan Rabbit Ragù

Holly Henderson for The New York Times

Rabbit leg stuffed with egg, bacon and offal. 

from the New York Times, global taste-makers of Yuppie International.

Wanderlust

The moment I stop and rest I look up at the road again and something small and nagging and insistent in my heart insists I throw it all off and walk again -

Guy Walks Across America

His route: Anyone Want To Do This???

The Sign and the Thing

There is something about human nature that is inherently awed by big things. I know this because I recently visited the St Louis Arch – this humongous steel sculpture, monumental, towering overhead overlooking the Mississippi. The response to something big – anything big – is always awe. Like the spacemen in Stanley Kubriks’ 2001: A Space Odyssey, the appropriate religious response is to whip out the camera and attempt to capture a sliver of it – not too different from the medieval pilgrim buying a little metal souvenir, or bowing at the feet of the thing and pocketing a little bit of dirt to keep in a small box. This is why the cynical South Dakotans decided to blow huge sculptures of presidents’ faces into a mountain – because they knew we are inherently impressed by bigness.

image source

We can laugh at this phenomenon, but the laughter dies away when we are confronted with a big thing – whether it’s a powerful man, the giant Mall of America – the largest mall in America (which I also stood at the feet of), a revered university, or even just a really, really large teapot. I mean, bigness makes us feel our smallness. Monumentality gives the illusion of immortality. We look at the St Louis Gateway Arch, and think, here is something man has achieved with the works of his hands – it looks like some relic of an alien race, left as a cryptic message for conspiracy theorists to decipher – but no, it was made by my race, my kind – and what a wonder and enigma is Man!

It stirs something fundamental in us – it makes us worship. Because we know we are mortal, mere walking, breathing time-bombs with a finite counter pasted across our chests, and that perhaps this thing, whatever this thing is, has a secret of something that lasts beyond time we can conceive – perhaps it is infinity, perhaps it is immortality. And because He made us to be immortal, we long for it – we rage against death, we allow ourselves, one by one by one, to be blindsided by it, unable to look it too long in the eye during our brief lives. But it is there, and it is raging at us, raging at us to find meaning, to find purpose.

And the thing about these big things is they always seem to be symbols – metaphors, similes, patterns that recur in the unconscious, things with unutterable meaning. Things which stand for other things. Things which stand for things which have no form. Things which are empty in themselves, except that they are imbued with heavy meaning.

To me, the Arch is always about infinity – that sweet yearning to encompass the globe, the sky. It always prefigures the rainbow, or is a left echo of the rainbow, that beautiful sign God set in the sky. I saw two rainbows this whole time, and was comforted, feeling a little like Noah, that yes, perhaps the days would be long before I saw floods, but I was on the right track. The first one, over the Atlantic, on a beach at Nankuket, Massachusetts; the second, set right over my train tracks, framing the gateway between Indiana and Chicago. They were little comforts, I guess, to a girl who cannot be sure one minute to the next where she’ll be going. Every time I see a rainbow, I think of my dad’s home remedy, from my great-grandmother. She used to say, if you have a wart, and you see a rainbow, you should rub the wart against the grass, and it will go away. I remember wanting to try this out badly, since I had a wart on my knee. I don’t remember anymore whether it was healed the day I saw that rainbow over the garden in Singapore. But my wart isn’t there anymore. I can’t for the life of me understand why I don’t remember such an important thing.

But I know that rainbows are about pointing the way – pointing forward, and pointing back. They are affirmations of a promise, a covenant God made between Himself and his beloved Earth. It was a cross of His tears and His beaming contenance, sorrow and relief flooding all at once. The St Louis Arch was conceived as  a frame for that golden land – the great (supposedly empty) West – the promised land, which (of course) always lay just out of one’s grasp, just out of reach. That is, if you were the conquering nation, and not the Native Americans who had to march that same route in tears, exiled from their own land. No, promised or not – the land is not the promise; the God Himself is.

For beautiful as they are, when we see the bow, it is only half the story – quite literally. For physics tells us that rainbows are, in fact, not arches but circles – we just never see the ends of them because our view on the ground cannot accommodate their perfection. Before the invention of the twin compasses, mankind spent no small effort trying to draw a perfect circle, imagining that if they could, they would discover the secret to perfection. We’ve all drawn circles now, of course, in primary school math class. But we fail to see the miracle of the perfect form, each point equidistant from the centre, with no edges, no points of division. Perfect equality, perfect harmony, perfect wholeness. Perfection – at the feet, encircling the Lord of Lords, the Prince of Peace, the Mighty God, Emmanuel, God the Three, and God the One. How beautiful He is in Revelation, his flashing eyes, his floating hair! How beautiful He is in my mind, with that rainbow sign, crowning His fair brow! How much glory there is even in ephemeral things, which man-made things only counterfeit, and then not with the delicacy and poignancy that Your touch lights upon the earth! How you love your people, that you should grant Beauty for promise’s sake, Beauty for our sake, Beauty for Your love, your delight, your pleasure.

I remember one of the dearest sermons I have ever heard, about God bringing the cloud, and setting His bow in the cloud – Oh He never spares us the cloud! For without the cloud there can be no dark grey to set the ribbons of light against – and if not for tears we can never see His unpuddled face.

Forgottonia

I was scrounging around Left Bank Books, St Louis, Missouri, and picked up the delightful volume “Lost States: True Stories of Txlahoma, Transylvania, and Other States that Never Made it” by Michael J Trinklein, and thought I would copy a passage relevant to my current location.

An accurate name for the land Illionis Forgot.

Illionis is pretty much all corn. Once you venture outside Chicago, the state becomes one giant field dedicated to the creation of tasty high-fructose corn syrup. To serve the corn farmers, small and medium-sized towns have grown up all across the Land of Lincoln – cities like Peoria, Decator, and Springfield.

What’s curious is that interstate highways connect nearly every one of the villages. Compare a map of Illionis to a map, say, of Iowa or Missouri, and you almost have to augh: Illinois has so many more miles of freeway compared to its neighbours.

Here’s how it happened: A big city like Chicago has a lot of people, and that means a lot of money and a lot of representation in Congress. But you can build just so many highways in the Windy city. So the “downstate” residents reap the benefits of living in a populous state…

Having said all that, one section of the state has been left out: the counties in the western bulge. Largely cut off by the Illinois River, this area didn’t get any fancy freeways in the 1960s and 1970s.

In protest, a group of residents decided to form their own state, Forgottonia. They appointed a governor and tried to attract attention. But what they really wanted was an interstate – specifically, Interstate 72, which would provide a shortcut between Chicago and Kansas City. Legilsation that would have authorized the construction of I-72 was defeated in Congress in 1968 and then again in 1972. Parts were eventually built decades later, but even today I-72 extends only to the Illionis-Missouri border….

Such is the sad story of Forgottonia. It never had a real shot at statehood – and it’s still pretty much forgotten. But they do have corn. Lots and lots of corn. So long as America keeps drinking sixty-four-ounce fountain drinks, Forgottonia’s people will survive. In fact, about the only thing that could hurt orgottonia would be medical reports suggesting high-fructose corn syrup isn’t healthy.

Oh.

Remember Me, Remember Me, Remember Me

Adieu, Adieu! Hamlet, Remember me!

- Ghost of Denmark

The psychiatrist Barry Reisberg first observed twenty years ago (that) the decline of an Alzheimer’s patient mirrors in reverse the neurological development of a child. The earliest capacities a child develops – raising the head (at one to three months), smiling (two to four months), sitting up unassisted (six to ten months) – are the last capacities an Alzheimer’s patient loses. Brain development in a growing child is consolidated through a process called myelinization, wherein the axonal connections among neurons are gradually strengthened by sheathings of the fatty substance myelin. Apparently, since the last regions of the child’s brain to mature remain the least myelinated, they’re the regions most vulnerable to the insult of Alzheimer’s. The hippocampus, which processes short-term memories into long-term, is very slow to myelinize. This is why we’re unable to form permanent episodic memories before the age of three or four, and why the hippocampus is where the plaques and tangles of Alzheimer’s first appear. Hence the ghostly apparition of the middle-stage patient who continues to be able to walk and feed herself even as she remembers nothing from hour to hour. The inner child isn’t inner anymore. Neurologically speaking, we’re looking at a one-year-old.

- from How to be Alone, Essays by Jonathan Franzen.

I’ve never been particularly good with my memory of external events. I think this shows in my dreams – I am not so attached to the external form of things as attached to my internal emotional state when large events happen to me. Of course, like everyone else, my memory is a weird pastiche of things which I remember first hand, embellished by stories narrated by my mother, (less but sometimes) my father, my aunt, my friends. And I am always stunned when an account of an event from another source clashes completely with my own – this has happened a few times, and I’ve always felt a kind of serious cognitive dissonance whenever it happens. I am so certain that my version must be right, and theirs wrong – fortunately for me, I have been addicted to writing ever since I discovered how, and so at least I have a logbook, as such, of events to “prove” that events really happened to me the way that they did, at least from inside my head. I am so thankful for the technology of writing – so, so thankful – because I can easily converse with my 10 year-old-self, my 14-year-old-self, even my 7-year-old self. And as I write this now, I write for my 30-year-old self, my 40-year-old-self, even my 80-year-old-self – I am in continuous conversation with myself. There are certain selves I really dislike, my 14-year-old self being one of them. I’ve been trying to learn compassion for those people, seeing as they were actually me. But it always startles me to realize that all this – all this, which seems to appear so solid, like a cinematic reel that I assume I could hold in my hands – is really a sort of cognitive phantom, a genie we unbottle to toy with for a while, which we cannot be certain we will ever be able to retrieve.

Franzen reminded me of the stuff I learned in my introductory psychology class – that memories are merely temporary constellations (the graphic in my textbook actually showed little red stars being united by red lines across the hemispheres of the brain), reinforced each time we conjure them, but subtly altered each time also by our brain chemistry at that moment on that day. Nothing is pure, nothing is original. Everything, like film itself – is burned away even as we watch it. There is no such thing as perfect archiving, perfect recall. All that is an illusion in the first place.

I understand the inherent hysteria that the inner historian in us feels when told something like this. But on the other hand, I wonder why we fear forgetting so much. Sometimes I fear remembering too much. It is blessed to forget – it makes it easier to forgive. The repressed memories of evil (which Freud inadvisedly, at times, dredged up) can surely be as harmful as the forgotten good ones. We see this phenomenon in history – we refuse to look at the dark periods of our own people, preferring to narrate a story of triumph and entitlement. In Australia there is an odd phenomenon of “black armband history” in which most of the history is narrated negatively, and the revisionists, instead of springing the occasional expose on the crimes of ancestors, try valiantly to paint a better picture of the nation (the ones who were not convicts, racists, jailers, etc.), only to be stomped upon by the liberals who yell that the wrongs are not yet redressed, so it’s premature to celebrate.

image from Wikipedia

I don’t know if this is right or wrong. But I do know that Britain has a curious preference to narrate itself as an underdog, even though it was a vast empire. And that Israel has the most hangdog national history of any people I can think of. America is very much triumphalist – hubristic, even, in its desire to be a nation before God, blameless and upright. France narrates itself as Reasonable, when in fact it swung from one kind of tyranny to another all the way until Napoleon imploded the empire. I think in any case it is best to, if one really wants to “know thyself”, as the apocryphal Greek sage(s) say, it is wise to go back and stare at the things you remember but wish you did not – the dark (or the light) side which was neglected when you started to narrate yourself wholly – to disillusion yourself to the things which you wish you had not done, to stare that beast in the eye and to understand it, and unite it with the godlike being who also dwells in the same breast. And then perhaps we can call ourselves Homo Sapiens – Man – “Knowing Man”, Wise Woman, Wise Man.

Urban Blight & Orwell’s Pyramid

You can tell a lot about a city from its county newspaper. Of course, I am unnaturally interested in regional newspapers because there weren’t any in Singapore where I grew up. I was stunned by the provincialism of the Western Australian, amused by the graphic focus of USA Today, temporarily seduced by the cosmopolitanism and urbane tone of the New York Times, and now I’m in St Louis I flapped open the NorthSider, a free mag (and apparently in its first issue) that was lying on my friend Darell’s breakfast table.

Here are some of July’s Headlines -

REBUILDING BLOCK BY BLOCK

A NEW TOOL FOR REPORTING ISSUES

“OPERATION UNITY” CALLS FOR END TO THE VIOLENCE

NEWSTEAD DEVELOPMENT NEARING COMPLETION

TRANSFORMING O’FALLON PARK

ST. LOUIS LANDS $21M FOR AFFORDABLE HOUSING

MISSOURI UNEMPLOYMENT NUMBERS SLIGHTLY BETTER

STATE OUTLAWS FAKE POT

Here are a selection of the ads:

MINORITY CONTRACTORS!

HELP KEEP YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD SAFE AND BRIGHT: LEAVE YOUR PORCH LIGHT ON!

LEADERS NEEDED! HELP RAISE THE STANDARDS – IF YOU DON’T LIKE WHAT’S HAPPENING ON YOUR BLOCK, HELP CHANGE IT!

So, I guess Darell did warn me before I came to St Louis that it is a “blighted city” – she’s working in an urban planning office to revitalize the city, after all, and it’s one of the most segregated (racially and economically) cities in America. Fortunately Southeast Asians are a bit of a rarity and so we encounter curiosity rather than hostility on either side. I had felt some of the tension in Chicago, but man, St Louis is something else.

“The Chinatown closed down,” Darell said, while we whooshed through the almost-empty metro onward to her apartment. “Have you ever heard of a Chinatown closing down??” Later in the evening I was cooking some Singaporean fish porridge for her. “Do you have any ginger?” She looked at me sheepishly. “You call yourself Malaysian???” “Judith, there isn’t an Asian grocery store around here!” Fair enough. We did, thankfully, have soy sauce and some pseudo-Asian fried onion flakes though. But no ginger.

“So what’s the socio-economic breakdown of St Louis, from what you’ve seen?”

“Hm, so, there are these really really rich people who live in mansions and have been here since the 1800s or something,” she said. “Then there are the young rich professionals who also live around that area. And then, well, there’s everyone else…”

“The proletariat?”

“Yup, the proles.”

“What would you say, 85%?”

“Yeah…. maybe 75%…. or yeah maybe 80.”

And you wonder why there’s crime and resentment and segregation.

I mean, here’s a little graphic depicting the social structure of Oceania in George Orwell’s 1984:

image from Wikipedia

Sounds about right?

I was talking to someone from China who was with the CCP from the start – he was a soldier in the PLA, a young, idealistic boy who joined up and wanted to help alleviate the suffering of the masses. He was curious about America, never having been there before.

“So, what do you find is different about America?” He asked, after relating his stories about the Chinese Civil War, and the Cultural Revolution. I was kind of embarrassed – not just because my Chinese vocabulary leaves much to be desired, but I wasn’t very sure what to say. Different from what? Different from Singapore? From America? From Australia? From everywhere else?

He gestured towards his balcony, which had a pretty green grill over it – it was a new condominium, and he’d just moved there in the last two years. “Do people have grates over their doors there?”

I wasn’t sure what he meant. “You mean, fences and gates for security?”

“Yes,” he said. “Do you need to keep thieves out?”

This was all a revelation to me. I had never lived in a place where you wouldn‘t want to at least install some grills over your windows. I mean, in Perth there weren’t fences around the houses, but already break-ins were more and more frequent and people were starting to put them up due to a surge of poor refugees into the city.

“Yes, yes, people have security grills.”

He laughed. “During the 1970s, everyone was equally poor,” he said. “There wasn’t anything worth stealing. We didn’t have grills over our windows then. I mean, we were all starving, but I guess we were all equal.”

I guess I just had never thought about it that way.

.

When I was back at college, I had to take a couple of psych tests in order to fulfill my requirement for Steven Pinker’s class, the Human Mind. At the beginning of the psych study we were asked what sorts of shapes we liked better – shapes like this:

image source

or this:

Generally, a preference for pyramidal structures indicates a tendency toward political and economic conservatism, while a preference for circular structures indicates a tendency toward political and economic liberalism.

Of course, it should come as no surprise that the actual pyramids of Egypt were built for a single man’s remains, possibly to preserve him as an immortal, on the backs of hundreds of thousands of slaves; it should also come as no surprise that the complete abject equality of the Cultural Revolution led to a destructive, collective purge of thousands of years of culture and civilization – in which the young and powerful beat the old and helpless, not for goods or because they were poor, but for fun, for acceptance amongst their peers, and out of a fierce, misguided ideological conviction.

In the end, all kinds of tyranny led to the same place: the War of All against All.

The PreHistory of Lake Michigan

My cab wove through the midafternoon traffic, tracing an arc along the frozen shore of Lake Michigan. On my right, the buildings of one of the world’s tallest cities stabbed toward the sky, steel and glass growing out of the Illinois prairie like modern incarnations of the grass and trees that once lined the lake. A thriving metropolis of nearly three million people, Chicago boasts and airport that was once the world’s busiest (it’s now second), with over 190,000 passengers a day passing through its terminals – including, on this particular day, me. This sprawling city prides itself on its dynamic, forward-looking culture – the “tool maker” and “stacker of wheat,” as Carl Sandburg called it. Not the most obvious place to come looking for the past.

The lake took me back in time, though – way back, before it was even there. Lake Michigan is actually a remnant of one of the largest glaciers the earth has ever seen. During the last ice age, the Laurentide ice sheet stretched from northern Canada down along the Missouri River, as far south as Indianapolis, with its eastern flank covering present-day New York and spilling into the Atlantic Ocean. When it melted, around 10,000 years ago, the water coalesced into the Great Lakes, including Michigan. Looking out the window of my cab, at the strong winds ripping across the expanse of ice reaching out from the Chicago shoreline, I felt like history might be rewinding itself. The ice age could have looked like this, I thought.

- Spencer Wells, Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization, Chapter 1: Mystery in the Map

image by Stephen Hudson from Wikipedia – Antarctic Ice Sheet

A friend of mine once spoke to me of glaciers – of the last traces of life in the Empty Continent (the only one left) – Antarctica. Of how it used to be green fields, and of how the ice has taken over, has left trace skulls and abandoned bacteria, of the tenacity of the last traces of life and also the cruelty of the emptiness – of pure abstraction, she said, like something by Bach.

And she also wrote to me (yes, I am a proud owner of a letter written in Antarctica!) about how the glacial pace of great change gave her hope, because the way that God works is skillful, is mysterious, is relentless, is slow – so slow that it tests our patience – but sure. Glacial change can harden the land – can make it so frigid, so cold that it cannot receive or sustain life. It makes the land barren. It begins a little by little – a little drop in temperature, a little formation of ice where water once flowed – but then before you know it, the land is white as snow, like the winter in Narnia – lasting an age instead of a season. And the opposite is true – what we are experiencing today – a little more methane and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a couple degrees’ temperature rise – oh it’s just a little, it makes Canada more livable, it gives deserts more rain – it drowns the Venetians (who know they have had it coming for a while), it drowns New Orleans. The levees break, the city weeps and leaves yet another Atlantis, yet another mythical advanced city wiped out by pure geography (helped along a little by unsustainable technology…).

Plan A: Natural Increase, Not Genocide

“Behold, I send an Angel before you to keep you in the way and to bring you into the place which I have prepared. Beware of Him and obey His voice: do not provoke Him, for He will not pardon your transgressions for My name is in Him. But if you indeed obey His voice and do all that I speak, then I will be an enemy to your enemies and an adversary to your adversaries. For My Angel will go before you and bring you in to the Amorites and the Hittites and the Perrizites and the Canaanites and the Hivites and the Jebusites; and I will cut them off. You shall not bow down to their gods, nor serve them, nor do according to their works; but you shall utterly overthrow them and completely break down their sacred pillars. So you shall serve the LORD your God and He will bless your bread and your water. And I will take sickness away from the midst of you. No one shall suffer miscarriage or be barren in your land; I will fulfill the number of your days. I will send My fear before you. I will cause confusion among all the people to whom you come, and will make all your enemies turn their backs to you. And I will send hornets before you, which shall drive out the Hivite, the Canaanite, and the Hittite from before you. I will not drive them out from before you in one year, lest the land ebcome desolate and the beast of the field become too numerous for you. Little by little I will drive them out from before you, until you have increased, and you inherit the land. And I will set your bounds from the Red Sea of the Philistines, and from the desert to the River. For I will deliver the inhabitants of the land into your hand, and you shall drive them out before you. You shall make no covenant with them, nor with their gods. They shall not dwell in your land, lest they make you sin against Me. For if you serve their gods, it will surely be a snare to you.”

- Exodus 23: 20-33

When Hernan Cortes first arrived in the Americas, the Aztecs he met with thought he was a long-awaited god, whom their prophets had said would come in that very year. They thought he was Quetzalcoatl, the son of god, and honored him in a manner befitting a god. He was received with great pomp and ceremony by Monteczuma II, king of the Aztecs. What happened afterwards is, of course, a matter of dispute, but both sides agree is reeks of opprobium. The European conquistadors and colonialists in the 16th through the 19th centuries claimed they were planting flags in foreign countries for “Gold, God and Glory“. From the accounts of Las Casas, a Spanish priest who was horrified that Spanish soldiers were raping native women and spearing their babies on sticks, and decided to write his harrowing account of the genocide that was occurring, since he believed that Spain would be damned if it continued sponsoring these men, “Gold” and “Glory” seem to leave “God” a far-distant third in their motivations. Though of course there were also people like Las Casas, who had the conscience to be horrified.

The Aztecs believed that they were being attacked by invisible arrows that pierced them and made them ill – not too bad a visualization of the works of virulent diseases. By way of explanation for the rape and pillage and inexplicable interest in the fictional “El Dorado”, they came to tell a story that the white man suffered from a sickness that only gold could cure -  that in the absence of gold, they went mad.

The Igbo people of what is now Nigeria (or so I am told) believed that the white men who came to their shores were dead ancestors come to visit, because their own skins turned pale when they died. The cowrie shells traded for slaves represented the bodies of their ancestral dead drowned at sea – they believed they were redeeming their ancestors, which they bought in exchange for the enemies, who were shipped off to the Americas – an efficient, not to mention profitable way of ridding the land of one’s enemies.

All this is painful history, and doubly painful for those who call themselves Christians – because it’s pretty good ammunition for the argument that Christians are no better than non-Christians; that sometimes pagans treat Christians better than vice versa. And to people who whip out this argument, I guess there’s only one thing to say: it’s true. Nominal or practicing, those who have flown the banner of Christ have behaved no better and no worse at their best and worst at various times in history.

So, all this begs the question: Where was God in all this?

Full Article at the Harvard Ichthus

Pointing to Indestructibility

Here is a cool video about the Pyramids at Giza.

I got the link from Cracked, which claims that the pyramids would probably have had a lot more bling on them, as it were, if we could see them in their full glory. This is also true, by the by, of the Greek and Roman statues which we think of as lovely marble white. Nope. They were probably painted the most garish of colours. A friend and I once reflected that Washington DC is built on a very misguided notion of how Rome looked like at the time (Source: actual exhibit that was at Harvard for a time! I loved this exhibit). In fact, if it wanted to be historically accurate, most of D.C. would be a loud shade of purple.

photo of Sphinx, partially excavated from Wikipedia.

also from Cracked.

So it was always my observation that earlier peoples liked bling. No one invented minimalism until the 20th century. Well, maybe the Puritans. But they didn’t call it minimalism. This is because poverty made bling very attractive. They got to a point where bling > no bling   –> more bling > less bling –> most bling > lots of bling. Only when we reached a point of ridiculous extravagance (think the Sun King in France) that you get a) revolutions b) voluntary renunciation c) minimalism = the new luxury (think Calvin Klein in the 90s). Yup.