In Motion: The Experience of Travel by Tony Hiss

 

In Motion: The Experience of Travel by Tony Hiss defies classification. Ostensibly it’s about travel, and it is, especially about what Hiss dubs “Deep Travel”. But Hiss is a talented writer and has an inquiring mind such that his book works much like Montaigne’s Essays: wondering here and there around a common theme. In some authors, of course, this can prove irksome and off-putting, but in this book, I gladly found myself following Hiss’s detours and by-ways as we explored Deep Travel.

Hiss doesn’t ever definitely define Deep Travel, but this is another potential defect that signals that the search is still underway. As a preliminary, we can say that Deep Travel is that journey, around the corner or around the world that alters our consciousness. Our mind, in its structures and perceptions, alters as we face a new landscape. Thus, while walking home during the 2003 NYC blackout, the hyper-city of NY alters without the flow of electricity, and Hiss experiences views and perspectives that he’d never encountered before. He also draws on the work of others, such as Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose meditation from a bridge crossing a river in the Balkans provides a verbal portrait of this same type of experience. Hiss transitions from experiences of travel as such into psychology, beginning with the great fountainhead of American psychology, William James, and then drawing upon the more recent insights of the late Edward S. Reed, an “ecological psychologist”. Indeed, a list of psychologists, anthropologist, paleontologists, and other writers and thinkers could go on for some length. Hiss explores here and there ideas as they occur to him. Hiss uses places with similar abandon for launching his insights: New Jersey swamps, NYC streets, Balkan Rivers, the primeval African savannah: so many references to place and ideas makes this into a buffet of ideas.

A lot of the latter part of the book concerns human origins and how we developed our brains that allows the psychology of Deep Travel to develop. Hiss argues that along with concentrated attention, daydreaming, and flow, humans developed a “wide-angle awareness” that allows us to scan and consider our environment with the use of our bi-pedal stance and stereoscopic vision. He relates this to the way cats can leisurely pause to wait for prey to place themselves in a position of exposure; that is, not ready to pounce and not indifferent, but widely alert, something called SMR (sensorimotor rhythm). (EEG leads on cat skulls first gave us this insight—I love the image.) One riff that Hiss takes on this is that exploring for knowledge, such as of place, has a built-in pleasure reward (like sex and food) that promotes such behavior.

It’s difficult to review this work because its ideas are so many and diverse as they array around this general topic. For some, this is a hindrance (see William Dalrymple’s critique in his NYT review), but for me, with Montaigne as a model and sufficient rewards for following Hiss’s curiosity, I really enjoyed the book. I highly recommend it to anyone who has the curiosity to follow him around in this journey of a book—and who has a yen to experience Deep Travel.

Some Thoughts About the Law Today

This blog by Jeffrey Toobin of the New Yorker raises interesting questions about the Edward Snowden matter. I share Toobin's concern about Snowden's going rogue and his naiveté about the Russians and Chinese. However, Snowden's actions, however right or however wrong, have caused prompted an important debate. The debate should become more lively and crucial with the recent actions of the Brits in detaining Glen Greenwald's domestic partner for nine hours under their terrorism act. For however we might rightly characterize Snowden and anyone working with him, they are not terrorists. You may argue that they are unwittingly aiding potential terrorists, but that's a different issue. Similarly, Snowden broke the law, but he did not "aid the enemy" because we have no "enemy". To start with, we are not at war with any country. Of course, individuals and groups want to harm us, that's a given. It's a new world in the sense that its not a nation (say like the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany) that threatens us so much as an amorphous, sometimes spontaneous phenomena of individual or small group efforts (for instance, the Boston marathon bombing brothers or the anti-technology guy who mailed bomb packages for several years). So we need to put Snowden's actions in perspective.

The Brits have really sharpened the argument with their actions. Whatever actions Greenwald and his fellows did or plan to do, it isn't terrorism, and yet the Brits detained and took items from Greenwald's partner under this pretext. This was an abuse of power. In a Tweet this I referred to John LeCarre's "paranoia": several of his recent novels have shown the Brits acting as lackeys for the Americans to perform tasks that were often stupid, illegal, and immoral. After this, I feel I owe him an apology: "I'm very sorry, John. My belief, or at least hope, that my government could not act so foolishly, callously, and immorally, let me to doubt your take on events. It's appearing more and more that you had it right". Anyone have his email?  Or, perhaps the Brits can abuse power quite in their own without any prompting by the U.S. government. Perhaps John doubts the initiative of his own government too much.

The Bill of Rights comes at a cost. Like most everything in life, these rights involve trade-offs. Free speech included in the First Amendment, for instance, allows any political fringe group, religious fanatic, or simple liars to say most anything that they want to say about our government and politics. In other words, to protect the good, we must allow the bad and sort it out later. Similarly, the provisions in the Bill of Rights about criminal procedure protect us from abuses of police power by protecting wrongdoers as well. In other words, we have to give the guilty a break (sometimes, not that often) in order to protect us all from abusive actions by the police and government. This was true in the late 18th century and it's still true in the early 21st century. But we must do more than simply point to the lovely words, we have to commit to enforcement of these rights  and take these matters most seriously. The debate should be serious and wide-ranging. The issue isn't that some would harm us: criminals domestically and hostile interests abroad have always been with us. The issue we  now should address concerns the parameters of the powers and protections that we should have under the new technological regime that we live in.

A recent article about civil forfeitures in the New Yorker provides a case in point. Civil forfeitures allow the government to take a person's property with little procedural protection if the property  might have been used or  involved in criminal wrongdoing, regardless of whether the owner of the property was involved. In a small town in Texas (I'm I surprised?) we learn of a police racketeering scheme to enrich the town and the police by bogus traffic stops and coerced forfeitures. So what happened? Nothing, no criminal charges against the police, although a civil suit did bring the practice to an end for now in that locale.

In a recent issue of Vanity Fair, Michael Lewis chronicles a frightening case of the misuse of a criminal prosecution against a former Goldman Sachs computer expert based upon slippery intellectual property laws. Reading the article, you thought it had a happy ending when the Court of Appeals (federal) reversed the conviction, only to learn that the state, apparently a the behest of a vindictive and deterrent-determined  Goldman, filed new charges on the same conduct. The matter, tried before a jury, was a fiasco given the alien nature of the Russian-born and educated computer genius and the forbidding complexity of computer code issues. If Lewis is correct--and he "re-tried" the case with real experts--we learn of a real miscarriage of justice and abuse of the system. Next to the government, how do we protect ourselves from the likes of Goldman Sachs and their ilk with unworldly financial power and clout--1% of the 1%?

I've invested 37 years of my life in our legal system. It can work well. It works imperfectly at best. We need always to challenge and criticize the system and decisions made within in it because we're human and prone to complacency, fear, and power-hunger. Look around the world and you can find beautiful words everywhere and shameful realities behind most of them. For the most part, we've avoided that, but we can lose it all in an instant if we're not vigilant. We all must constantly stand up to fear and power, our twin enemies. In this effort I consider myself not a Democrat, not a Republican, but an Actonian, after Lord Acton, the great British historian who coined the phrase that "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely". We must constantly speak truth to power, or we will lose truth, lose democracy, and enslave ourselves to those who will prey upon our fears and weakness.

A Review of A Time to Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Last summer I read Tony Hiss’s In Motion (which I’m now re-reading), and he discussed and quoted from the work of Patrick Leigh Fermor. About the same time, I read an article by William Dalrymple, who also mentioned Fermor in glowing terms. Thus, when I saw the title A Time for Silence on the Prairie Lights remainder table, grabbed it. I quickly read the short work and thought it a gem. This summer, I found it on the shelf and I’d recommended it to Tanta Rose, so I re-read it. This time I admired the gem, not rushing it, but slowly turning it over to appreciate its many facets, as one might admire a gemstone, and it was time well spent. 

In the 1950’s, Fermor left the lights of Paris and headed to a Benedictine monastery in France, not as a pilgrim, but as a refugee. He wanted solitude to write, and so he came as a guest. After a couple of days of what I might call decompression, he settled into the rhythms of the monastic life and began carefully observing the ways of the monastery. In masterful, almost poetic prose (for which I now understand that he’s rightly famous), he describes this world: its history, its practices, its ambiance. 

Fermor goes on to another Benedictine monastery, one that specializes in practicing and preserving Gregorian chant, and we can sense the order of the chant and the monastery, as we read his descriptions of the stone edifices. As we read the brief history of these ancient institutions, we appreciate how complex and resilient they are. A third stop is a Cistercian monastery, where the strict practice of silence rules. Fermor finds this practice more forbidding and difficult to appreciate, yet his quiet observations never fail to inform. 

Finally, Fermor writes about the long abandoned stone monasteries of Cappadocia in Turkey, where strange looking rock formations were hewn to allow entire subterranean monasteries to exist in the remote section of that country. A Byzantine world gone underground. 

I’ve passed my copy on, so I can’t provide any quotes that might exhibit how this beautiful book works through its poetic prose and I wish I could, because my own meager words and review can’t do it justice. Assuming you get the NYRB re-print, do read the introduction by Karen Armstrong (herself once a member of a convent), which provides some context and even mild criticism of this work. It’s well worth your time as well. If you’ve ever wondered about these worlds outside the world, I can’t think of a better place to begin your exploration and appreciation than with this book.

Story Craft: The Complete Guide to Writing Narrative Nonfiction by Jack Hart

The art of telling an effective story, whether as a matter of fiction or of non-fiction, has become increasingly celebrated and promoted as the most effective means of communicating a message. Wherever we turn for advice about communicating effectively, we're told about the power of story—or narrative, if you prefer the more hifalutin term. The reasoning is simple: we seem programmed to remember stories, tales across time involving characters who engage us in their pursuits. 

Jack Hart is a professional journalist who describes the skills needed to write an effective non-fiction story for a newspaper or magazine. The book provides many tips and explanations about how good stories are written. He also discusses the usefulness of ways of communicating other than by narrative, such as by explanation or report. But the award-winning stories that Hart's colleagues have written about all sorts of topics have enhanced their effectiveness (and one assumes their readership) by using narrative. The elements, when you reflect upon them, seem almost self-evident: characters (persons that we can care about and understand); a conflict or obstacle that presents the protagonist with a challenge; change through time (a narrative arc); carefully considered facts necessary to give life to the scenes. Like lawyers, journalists have a professional ethical obligation to "tell the truth," as problematic as that obligation is. Both professions require us to ground our narrative in some sense in "what really happened," perhaps easier for journalists because they don't (or least shouldn't) work for self-interested clients. One of Hart's main concerns is the ethics of truth-telling, including an exploration of those boundaries. 

Who might enjoy this book? Anyone who might want to tell a story, fiction or non-fiction. (The fundamentals of the two genres are not so different, and Hart draws on numerous sources that were written about fiction and playwriting.) However, I read Hart's book from the perspective of an attorney, an advocate. I’m convinced more and more that the first job of an advocate is to learn and then tell our clients’ stories in a comprehensible and engaging manner. In some cases, the law as written may prove an insurmountable road block to a remedy. But in most cases, especially in those that require a judge or a jury to resolve, making the client and the client’s plight as sympathetic as possible is an essential component of successful advocacy. Lawyers don’t write essays about “why my client should win in 500 words or less," but our briefs come close to allowing us to do that. As advocates, attorneys need to become as literate in telling a story as we are in forming an argument (which also may incorporate storytelling). Many attorneys face challenges with younger jurors and lawyers who possess a native mastery of visual storytelling that older, more logocentric persons like me lack. But I suspect that whether the story is told only in print, many of the same principles apply in visual mediums. If the book has one weakness, it’s that it's limited to exploring narratives only via the written word. Oral and visual storytelling must gain a place in the advocate’s arsenal in addition to the written word. 

But make no mistake: this is an outstanding book, well considered and well written, even if it's not written as a narrative!  Anyone with any occasion to consider writing a narrative will benefit greatly from this book