What follows is an installment of Lightplay, my email newsletter. To receive this in your email inbox, subscribe here.
Dear Reader —
Greetings on another Sunday in the interminable present from which 2020 is apparently fashioned. Will the year ever end? Will the final six weeks somehow outdo in chaos and pestilence the preceding forty-eight?
This morning I received one of the golden tickets of 2020: another negative COVID test result. I hope you, too are staying COVID-safe and -lucky. Now is no time to get lax in our dodging of the virus. If you recall back to August’s Lightplay 09 – the Strangest Summer, guest epidemiologist Erin Graves Quansah warned that “as the pandemic goes on, those who seemed immune to or felt unconcerned with the early waves may well end up bearing the brunt of later and, in many cases, more deadly waves.” Today this seems to be borne out, as ERs and COVID wards fill with younger patients and patients without known comorbidities. So don’t let up! Keep up the good work of protecting yourself and your community by staying safe, wearing a mask, and certainly not dining indoors around people not in your bubble.
But that’s not what I want to focus on, this Lightplay. I’d rather talk about the experience of time, portable dwellings, the sweetness of fruit. The small pieces of life and thought that lend it its savor.
I. Chronos
I’ve spent some of the last year studying images of myself as an older man. In one image I’m perhaps sixty. In the next, I look like I might be eighty-five.
The images sometimes disgust me. Other times they terrify me. Will I really look this way? Is there no escaping this fate? Oh man, I am going to be ugly.
There’s something transgressive, in a society that venerates youth, to considering your face as an old man. It tickles all sorts of shame centers in your brain; you subconsciously reach for the anti-wrinkle gel.
Yet they’ve stayed with me, these images. I keep looking at them. And as I’ve become more and more comfortable looking at them, I’ve come to see that they have a beauty, too. It wouldn’t be so bad to have a face like that, one full of wrinkles and far from youth. For one, it would mean I had survived that long. I’d have some stories to tell. Some people might still love me, even.
To be clear, I have not been receiving time traveled photographs from the future. These images were created by an algorithm, through an app called FaceApp. The app became popular about a year ago—and quickly provoked a privacy backlash, as the company that makes it is based in Russia. Putin will have your photo!
If you can handle Putin having a photo of your face, though, it sure will turn it into a photo of an older face. And if you feed photos through twice, you can get ’em looking really old.
In one of his lectures, Alan Watts says that everyone should “observe skulls and skeletons and…wonder what it would be like to go to sleep, and never wake up.” He says that contemplation and acceptance of death is like manure: “very highly generative of creating life.”
For me, I’m happy just to consider my old, wrinkly visage. I know I’m no Dorian Gray. Time will have its way with me. But I’m forewarned. I’m warming up to becoming that guy.
II. Nomads
The passage of time, its inexorable march, often gives me angst. Kashgar’s old city is bulldozed, Aleppo is bombed to bits. John Prine dies, Klay Thompson ruptures his achilles’ tendon. College days are over, my twenties have ended. The loss of how things were can be so sad. The golden age is always just past.
I do my best to remind myself of something else that is true: the golden age is also, often, right now. Don’t miss it. These, too, are the times that we will remember.
This is true on a personal level but also on a global one. So much beauty, history, and culture is still right here. I think of the many folkways that are endangered around the world. Somehow, so much still exists, so many people carry on life in the old ways. And today there are growing movements to protect them, to keep languages alive, and to bring back older ways of life.
I want to point your attention toward one very specific example of the way today is a golden age of protecting and documenting ancient ways of life: a Youtube channel that captures and shares the extremely various ways that nomadic peoples make shelter. It’s called Nomad Architecture.
Nomad Architecture’s videos are to all appearances made by one guy, Gordon Clarke, director of the Institute of Nomadic Architecture—also seemingly a one-man shop. He’s traveled around Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Europe documenting these nomadic building techniques.
The videos are entrancing journeys to distant worlds and ways of life. I find myself mesmerized, watching Khanty women harness vast herds of reindeer, watching Shahsavan men erect a beautiful round half-globe of a tent, and watching a whole Arbore family build a home out of reeds. It renews my love for this world, with such different people in it.
Of course there’s a problematics to a Brit named Gordon Clarke jetting around the world to document various indigenous peoples. With these videos I think he runs the risk of joining the long parade of Western anthropologists who have tried to document a culture and ended up—more or less wittingly—collaborating in the destruction of that very culture. I acknowledge this, and I think that these are problems we need to continue grappling with. At the same time, often past anthropological works are the primary remaining documentation of cultures and can serve as instruction for those hoping to bring back the old ways and languages.
Our world is complex. By my reckoning, at least, these Nomad Architecture videos are a meaningful contribution to our understanding of its complexity. What is best about the videos is their steady focus on the material culture of their nomadic subjects and the camera’s patient, admiring eye. They also delight as films created by an engaged, unembarrassed mind.
III. Fruit
What’s better than going to the asian grocery and buying a big pomelo and a bag of longan? Getting a box of green figs and slicing them all up? Going to a friend’s orchard and filling a box with apples and asian pears?
This morning, I took two perfectly-ripe Bartlett pears out of the fridge and cut them into cold slices. I ate them slowly, slice by slice. They had a custardy texture and sweetness, set off by the gentle tartness of their skins.
They reminded me how perfect a fruit can be.
Treat yourself to a perfectly ripe fruit. Settle in and watch Siberian nomads erect a tipi in the biting cold. And while you’re at it, age a photograph of yourself and marvel at the years yet to come, the adventures you have yet to etch on your very visage. No matter what you do, I hope that you stay safe and happy. See you next week!
Jasper
22 November 2020