An Analogy of War

Max Ernst, French, Born Germany, 1891- 1976.

Spanish Physician, 1940, Oil on Canvas.

Photographed by Judith Huang at the Art Institute of Chicago, IL.

My interpretation:

The Horse of War, a sheet masking his true nature, looks curiously –

A woman, her face stricken with fear, her clothes half torn with starvation, runs off the frame, desperately tossing a token of peace – a blind bird –

The squat man stands, oblivious, on the left. On the hip of his horse is the face of death – the face of war and death.

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…).

Look, Ma! I’m On A Boat!

This morning I went with Audrey to church (Holy Trinity Church, Downtown Chicago), and even before the service began there were the announcements which made me realize we were in the right place, because a couple in Hawaiian shirts had invited the whole congregation to an afternoon picnic on their boat to watch the world cup final! And so I went, and I WAS ON A BOAT. IT WAS AWESOME. BUT THE NETHERLANDS LOST!

Also we met two pastors, Pastor Kim and Pastor Dennis, and Pastor Kim is married to a Malaysian American and Pastor Dennis grew up as one of seven children, some of whom were adopted, and African American – he told us about his two African American sisters – one of whom married a white man and the other who married a fellow African-American, and how his nephew sometimes got confused cos one of their uncles was white and another was black.
Praise the LORD!

I Guess We Didn’t Win

from Niketown in Chicago!

This Is A Pipe

Art Institute of Chicago, Modern Wing. Painting by Rene Magritte. Text in French “This is not a pipe”.

Pipe courtesy of the Harvard Ichthus, for my 23rd birthday.

Chicago History Museum

Thanks Ben and Christine for taking me to the Chicago History Museum! I had a blast 🙂

This is Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable, the first permanent settler in Chicago. Of African descent, he married a Native American called Catherine. (1745 – 1818). He looks white in this picture but there is another pic of him that looks darker.

This is Me-Te-A, a Potawatimi chief who, together with Ottawa chief Blackbird, fought on the side of the British against the Americans in the War of 1812 for control over the fur trade. The fur trade ended around about 1690 due to overtrapping.The print I copied was printed by LT Prowon’s Lithographic Establishment, Estb. in No. 94, Walnut Street.

This is a nameless Anarchist who rioted in Chicago in 1886. A bunch of anarchists were hanged for sedition and terrorism. Print by Thure de Thulstrup, for Harper’s Weekly, May 15 1886. I think his hand gesture is like Lenin’s.

This is Abraham Lincoln, one of my two favourite American presidents. This bronze head was in the Lincoln Park part of the museum.

I cross Lincoln Park on a winter night when the snow is falling.

Lincoln in bronze stands among the white lines of snow,

his bronze forehead meeting soft echoes of the

newsies crying forty thousand men are dead along the Yser,

his bronze ears listening to the mumbled roar of the city at his bronze feet.

“Bronze”by Carl Sanburg (1878 – 1967) during WWI, Chicago Poems.

–

I have a couple more sketches. But here’s this for now.