[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JorPc1F2-U8&w=700] [31.08 for the famous bit, but I reckon do the whole thing]
[youtube http://youtu.be/j2ghVpNCVe4&w=700]
...it involves doodles, a bit of tracing paper or some cheese wrap and a lot of fun. Found it on boooooooooom, one of my favourite arty sites. Such a genius idea, I love it. Was screened at Pictoplasma last year. [vimeo http://vimeo.com/34698421 w=700&h=390]
Mother o’ Mine Rudyard Kipling
If I were hanged on the highest hill, Mother o’ mine, O mother o’ mine I know whose love would follow me still, Mother o’ mine, O mother o’ mine!
If I were drowned in the deepest sea, Mother o’ mine, O mother o’ mine I know whose tears would come down to me, Mother o’ mine, O mother o’ mine!
If I were damned of body and soul, I know whose prayers would make me whole, Mother o’ mine, 0 mother o’ mine!
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To My Mother Robert Louis Stevenson You too, my mother, read my rhymes For love of unforgotten times, And you may chance to hear once more The little feet along the floor.
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if there are any heavens my mother will E. E. Cummings
if there are any heavens my mother will(all by herself)have one. It will not be a pansy heaven nor a fragile heaven of lilies-of-the-valley but it will be a heaven of blackred roses
my father will be(deep like a rose tall like a rose)
standing near my
(swaying over her silent) with eyes which are really petals and see
nothing with the face of a poet really which is a flower and not a face with hands which whisper This is my beloved my
(suddenly in sunlight
he will bow,
& the whole garden will bow)
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By Rick Telander in Men's Journal. There is a decision you must make. The world is vast and unstructured. In it, things move seemingly at random. There comes a narrowing, a focusing, as the aperture reduces and reduces. The act, combined with training and skill and vision and, yes, philosophy, leads to a gradual, noiseless ratcheting down and down, like ripples in a pond going backward toward the pebble, closer and closer, smaller and smaller, the chaos dissipating into a tiny center of detailed clarity. And then the trigger.
Scott Tyler has been out of the Navy Seals for two years, but you don't simply forget what you did best. And what he did best, other than lead men in high-stakes combat, was aim a high-caliber, long-range rifle at a "target," be that machine, structure, or, most relevantly, a man, and, in Tyler's words, "take it out." That is what snipers do. Their craft – a part of warfare since the emergence of the Kentucky rifle during the American Revolution and in some ways even further back, to whenever the first accurate, long-distance bow shooter or rock thrower appeared – might seem outdated in an era of smart bombs and computer-controlled drones. But that is not the case. In the mountains of Afghanistan and the streets of Iraq, where the sporadically appearing plainclothes enemy might be far away, amid protective rocks, or close-up amid innocent citizens, stealth killing and accurate killing – the sniper's trademarks – are essential.
To shoot a man from a distance is a fascinating, awe-inspiring thing. It is nearly mythic in its godlike bequeathal of power. You are here, and he is there, and the connective and intensely private embrace is one of death. The two parties are linked by the flight of a tiny projectile traveling at supersonic speed, arriving to do its work well before the sound does and a moment after the powder flash and smoke are visible. To see that brief flash and to recognize, if only for a millisecond, that you will be the recipient of the explosive message, after which you will cease to exist, must be among the more horrifying recognitions there is. If the chamber noise is reduced and the blast light dulled (Tyler and the men he directed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Philippines generally used silencers or suppressors on the barrels of their rifles), the impact – a far-off head exploding, an arm abruptly detached, a body suddenly pierced by an invisible drill – occurs in a world without context or reason for the enemy, and is therefore not just terrifying but dispiriting.
"Long-range target interdiction: That's the two-dollar phrase," says Tyler, who sometimes speaks so quietly that you find yourself studying his lips. "In a conventional war you're on the battlefield, and if you look over and your buddy's head blows up and then you see another friend go down, it freaks you out. It demoralizes you; it makes you question things. It's a psychological thing. You, as a sniper, try for the highest-ranking person, if you can, to create that chaos. But in an insurgency, as we have now, when the enemy comes out in ones and twos, sometimes right in the cities, without ever being a big force, it's all ambush. So it can be better to have snipers rather than a man on every corner. A sniper team can stay hidden.''
Tyler now works when he can as a security consultant – a job that still takes him to hot spots such as Somalia and Iraq. His company, Qaletaqa Corps, works with various governments, tracking down terrorists and war criminals, and with private companies, planning logistics for their personnel traveling to volatile regions, sometimes even accompanying them. He was also recently featured in a short-lived reality show on NBC called 'The Wanted.' In that show, Tyler and three other specialists tracked down alleged terrorists and killers now living freely in other countries. Instead of a rifle, Tyler carried a passport and a camera. The trouble with the show was it made no final sense. The evildoers had found legal loopholes so they could live openly, and Tyler sure as hell couldn't go to, for instance, Norway, where the first episode occurred, and blast a dude from half a mile away. Though that would have been something.
At 5-foot-11, 185 pounds, Tyler is modestly sized, if muscular, with thick blacksmith hands, dark hair showing flecks of gray, and green eyes, one of which – the left – bears a birthmark that sometimes lends that iris a golden hue. Maybe the defect is actually a gift, because Tyler has 20/20 vision in his right eye but 20/15 in the left.
That's not the only unusual thing about Tyler, 36, a man who likes to meditate and contemplate big philosophical issues, such as the meaning of life. "People expect him to be so macho,'' says his mother, Kate, a former hippie who made jewelry and traveled about with her son in a lime-green school bus in southern California before settling down with second husband Darrol Rice in Rio Linda. "They expect that of a sniper. But he's so thoughtful, so open to suggestions, so concerned about others. When he was a little boy, he found five dollars on the playground, and he turned it in. When he went to sign up for the Marines, I thought we were going to the mall so he could hit me up for comic books."
He was 18 then, in 1991, coming off a restless high school career. (He was kicked out after spending more time surfing than studying, but eventually earned his GED.) He served a tour in Somalia, got out in 1996, and enrolled at the University of California–Berkeley. The elite, famously liberal school wasn't exactly clamoring for a surfer-dropout-turned–G.I. Joe, but Tyler cajoled military officials into writing him letters of recommendation. He settled on chemistry as his major, "because chemistry had kicked my ass'' in some early classes there, and he wasn't backing down from it again. After a year he had a 3.8 GPA, but his view of life from the chemistry lab was not fulfilling.
He had had a dream: He would continue on to medical school, become a doctor, and, rifle hanging in the back of his truck, work on an Indian reservation, where he would save lives while hiking into the roughest terrain. "I wanted to help people," he says. "But I was managing an apartment building and spending 80 to 90 hours a week studying. For what? So I could spend 80 to 90 hours a week studying in med school? I wanted to learn – knowledge for knowledge's sake – but it was all so competitive for no reason, so full of backstabbing, just a meat grinder. I looked out the windows of the lab, and there were the hills. And I knew I wanted to be back around people I liked being around."
So he switched his major to cognitive science – "why we think what we think," he says – and began hanging out with professors, "talking and trying to learn from them." One afternoon, Tyler and I visit his favorite professor at Berkeley, a cheerful man named John Matsui, the head of the scholars program in the department of integrative biology. As we sit in the campus coffee shop, Matsui says with something like awe, "I never had a student like Scott before. I knew you were intelligent. I saw that you would never quit. Your story was… different. Coming to school the way you did. Your desire to learn."
Even so, after he graduated in 2000, Tyler had had enough of school, and he felt himself drawn back to the military, but this time in more of a thinking role. He joined the navy to become a SEAL, one of those supersoldiers trained not only to fight on sea, on land, or in the air, but also to operate more independently. "I wanted to work in as small a unit as possible," he says. "I wanted to take all my determination, intentions, and skill and deliver it as precisely as I could – on the tip of a single bullet."
And that is how a sniper was born.
Part of being a great sniper is having the ability, the mind-set, to blend in, to disguise oneself, to become part of the landscape, to feel and react like soil, like leaves blowing in the wind. In The Ultimate Sniper, a technical guide for advanced snipers that Tyler references again and again, there is a section on Ghillie suits, the camouflage outfits that are designed to resemble the surrounding landscape. "A properly made Ghillie suit so well conceals the wearer that it never fails to impress first-time viewers,'' writes the author, retired army special forces major John L. Plaster. At sniper school, when an instructor talks about the suits, the point is reinforced when, after a spell, an innocuous part of the ground in front of the recruits slowly rises up and becomes human.
"The most important thing about a Ghillie suit is that you can attach other things to it," says Tyler. "It has loops everywhere, and you gather whatever's in your environment – leaves and grass and branches – and tape or string or zip-tie them on. It's a layman's myth that you cover yourself with burlap and you look like Chewbacca and that's that."
Snipers, whenever possible, work as two-man teams – one man spotting with a powerful scope, another shooting. But often even harder than shooting is the act of getting within range. It consists of patience almost beyond belief. There is the high crawl, the elbow crawl, the low crawl, and the sniper crawl. "The sniper crawl is the lowest, slowest movement technique…" Plaster writes, "used when movement must be so slow that there is no visible action to detect. [The sniper] creeps along, only four inches per move, using just fingers and toes to propel himself." With a rifle, of course.
Then come the difficult decisions. "I liked the cut-and-dry, liked it if a guy had a gun and was shooting at our troops, and we shot him," says Tyler. "It's a situation of less ambivalence. Nobody wants to go out and murder someone. You don't shoot just because you can. You have the trigger depressed and there is that final quarter-pound of pressure, and if you make a bad call.… Well, a 'bad kill' can create more insurgents, bad feelings, an international incident. But the biggest thing is, you have to live with it.''
Tyler has won two bronze stars for valor. The first one stemmed from a 2003 incident in which his sniper team was providing support for a unit taking down a Taliban stronghold in the Afghanistan mountains. "We got into a combat situation and had to shoot our way through it," says Tyler, reluctant to say more. It's the second bronze star, though, that illustrates how gray the decision making in the field can get. That one came after a 2005 firefight in the Philippines, where he and other U.S. soldiers had been sent to assist the government in hunting down extremists. The document that accompanied that award notes that Tyler "without regard for his own personal safety…led a two-man element to rescue four injured personnel." The truth is that Tyler came damned close to disobeying orders, since he was supposed to be an "observer," not a combatant. He and another SEAL used two small boats to go up a river, firing all the way, to pull out ambushed and wounded Filipino troops. It was political dynamite, but human grace. Tyler could have been court-martialed as easily as decorated.
"The men had been shot up; they were bleeding out," he says. "I got on the phone with the captain back at the base, and he wanted us to wait. He didn't want to make the call, politically. Then my phone fell in the water. It kind of slipped out of my hand. Even now I don't know if I did it on purpose." Three of the four men he rescued survived, and Scott Tyler's reputation spread.
The men in his platoons revered him, because he was meticulous, because he was loyal and smart, because he followed the rules but still thought philosophically and creatively. "I love the guy like a brother," says Dave Hansen, a 13-year SEAL chief petty officer who served under Tyler in Iraq in 2005. "He constantly thought outside the box. Need something done? Just give him the facts and leave him alone. Because he was so good at so many things, he was always able to get us into combat, which is the point. I mean, there he is, knee-deep in craziness, smoking a lot of dudes, and doing it the right way. Mr. Rice" – Tyler recently changed his name from Rice back to Tyler, his birth name, as a way of reconnecting with his birth dad, but many of his fellow former soldiers still call him that – "he is the kind of guy who's gonna save your ass. Maybe that's what comes through in his art.''
Oh yes, the art. Tyler is a sculptor; he learned welding from his birth father and has created some remarkably beautiful and thought-provoking moving sculptures out of stainless steel and stone. We visit a gallery in Stinson Beach where one of his pieces, Spatial Relationships, is on display in the yard, and the slightest breeze sets arms on the heavy, earth-toned metal-and-rock form into improbable, silent, delicate motion. "My art has to do with the positive spaces and negative spaces of a landscape,'' Tyler explains. "That goes with the art of being a sniper. A person's instinct, your eye, will go from positive space – a tree, a rock – to positive space. Negative space is the space in between. Deer and coyotes have the ability, with their coloring, to stand still in negative space, to hide in plain sight. Our eye notices straight lines, perfect circles, shiny things in the wild because they're out of place. Those are not natural forms or shapes. I like things that blend into the landscape. I find nothing more beautiful than trees and rocks.''
Scott Tyler was in a stone hut in Iraq's Amdar province, east of Ramadi. This was in 2005, and the wrecked little building, about 10 feet by 12 feet, had been dubbed "the hot dog stand" by members of the SEAL team who occasionally used it for cover in the no-man's-land of destruction. Tyler was with two men from his sniper team, observing the gray ambivalent scene outside, when they noticed a suspicious-looking local man checking out places where the SEALs sometimes set up. The man studied the road the military used regularly. He had on a robe, and it was impossible to see what he might be carrying underneath. The man looked at the hut. He walked closer and stared into the opening about five feet off the ground, at eye level, the place where the SEALs had built an observation deck out of bricks inside the hot dog stand. The man stared directly at Tyler, from six feet away, into his face.
Tyler was covered with his own handmade camouflage suit, spray-painted different colors "like a chameleon," with a mottled front he had designed "not to look like a human, but to be natural and exist in negative space, to be invisible." He had layers of mosquito netting covering his face, and he had backed into the shadows. The man could not see Tyler, could not even see his green eyes.
"Every hair on my body was standing on end,'' Tyler says. "He could have tossed a grenade into that opening. But I need to see that he is a threat, absolutely. I need to know. He has to deserve to die."
The man left and 20 minutes later returned with someone else. The first man began to dig a hole in the roadway with a trowel while the other served as a lookout. The first man dropped something into the hole, perhaps a bomb.
"I didn't have a rifle, but I confirmed the target – both of those guys – and I cleared my men hot. It would be a simultaneous shoot. I counted down – 'Three, two, one…' and we took out the mine guy, about 75 meters away, and the lookout guy, about 125 meters away, at the same time. We had to do it precisely so that neither would be alerted. Within seconds a truck came flying down the road and picked up the farther body. But the first guy had fallen directly on top of the mine, or whatever it was. And it was a mine. We detonated it, and he disappeared."
Tyler didn't take those death shots, but he produced them. Though he won't talk about it, it seems likely that snipers under his command have killed more than two dozen men, and he himself has killed maybe a half dozen or more. He won't deny that. And maybe the body count is much higher. He doesn't like to discuss it. "There are noncombatants in that number," he says.
"If I shot somebody, or men under my command did, I took full responsibility for that. I know that helped the men, lifted the burden." But what about the burden on him? "It sucks. It's impossible, really, trying to be precise. Nothing is clear. I never had a textbook case. Never. You do your best. You follow the rules of engagement, your conscience. And then the next morning you wake up and you think, Oh, my God."
At a shooting range outside Nevada City, far up in the wooded, mountainous eastern corner of California, not far from Reno, Tyler lies motionless on his belly in his khaki uniform, his heels pressed flat on the wooden platform, an Austrian-made Steyr Mannlicher .308 collector-grade sniper rifle pressed against his cheek. The rifle is brand-new and belongs to a range member named Rod. Next to Tyler is a box of Hornady 150-grain, lead-core, copper-jacketed, high-impact bullets with polymer tips. The tips are harder than the surrounding lead, so the synthetic red cone will be driven back on impact, causing a small explosion of lead fragments into the target, thus creating a larger hole at the back of a man than at the front. These bullets will travel more than half a mile per second.
Each rifle a sniper uses has unique characteristics that are compounded by the ammunition and many, many exterior factors. There is wind. There is humidity. There is the spin of the Earth. There is even the fact that as a rifle is fired, its barrel heats up, the metal contracts, and the bullets are propelled faster. As a sniper Tyler had a "quiver of rifles," including a huge .50-caliber McMillan Brothers bolt-action, a .300 Winmag, and an MK 12, which he liked because it was light and small, though it "didn't pack much of a punch" in the recoil. But his favorite was a CheyTac .408, a weapon he discovered late in his career and never used on a human. "It was accurate up to 2,500 yards," he says. "The round had a very stable flight. Most rounds, when they go from supersonic to subsonic, start to tumble. This one tumbles and then restabilizes."
I ask Tyler about the drama shots we see from snipers in the movies, like how they always seem to be shooting one another through their scopes. "It's mostly Hollywood," he says. "Head shots seldom happen. Anywhere from here to here" – he indicates the lower chest to the neck – "is good. There are so many variables. A shot that's off by an inch at 100 yards will be off by 10 inches or more at a thousand yards."
To ensure he's as accurate as possible, Tyler meticulously charts the results from his practice shooting, logging all the variances he can think of – temperature, barometric pressure, wind speed, direction. He's looking for patterns – not just, say, how one type of bullet might vary from another, but how one particular batch of that bullet might vary. "That way when it comes down to game time you know what's going to happen," he says.
In combat Tyler never took a shot from more than 400 yards. But at a practice range in Idaho, he once hit a foot-square metal target from 1,600 yards. He was shooting across a valley, amid a furious wind and rain, and still hit the target on his first try. "We used the ballistic computers to deal with the environmental conditions," he says matter-of-factly. That bullet was in the air for well over a second, rising, spiraling, descending, and fading to the right like a Tom Brady Hail Mary pass.
As astonishing as that feat was, it doesn't come close to the long-distance killing record that was recently set by a Canadian sniper in Afghanistan. His fatal shot traveled 2,657 yards – more than a mile and a half. That bullet was in the air for four seconds and dropped 146 feet, while also curving to the side a good amount. "Those Canadians," Tyler says, "they're raising the bar pretty high."
The range is now silent, even though 15 men have come by from various spots, shuffling and eager, to see the SEAL shoot.
"Going hot,'' Tyler says.
He appears to have no breathing at all, no motion, no nothing. His feet are laid out flat on their sides behind him because snipers do not give the enemy even the sight of raised heels as targets.
There is an explosion, and then silence. He racks the bolt, and a bright, smoking casing pops out. He picks it up and lays it carefully to his right. He shoots again.
When he shoots, Tyler keeps both eyes open and lets the floating circular reticules hover like a halo around the target. "I try to get in a good pattern of breathing, try to relax everything. I'll pull the slack off the trigger and know I'm at the point where only the mechanism is barely keeping the hammer back. You do not slap the trigger. You have to be in the moment. It's a little bit of an out-of-body experience." High-powered rifles are incredibly loud. They can be deafening. But Tyler has shot in war zones without muffling devices or earplugs. And a strange thing happens. "I don't hear the blast,'' he says. "I don't hear anything."
He mentions that many hunters – regular guys out for deer, longhorn, elk – flinch at the last moment, because they're not relaxed. Because they're thinking of what they're doing. A sniper can do what he does because – after months and months of training and study and reflection – he knows that he has done it all before thousands of times, effortlessly. "It's like golf,'' Tyler says, "except every time you swing there's an explosion in your face."
This gun, a gun he never used before, misfires three times on the range, and the scope has never been accurately adjusted, but when we walk the 218 yards – two football fields, two end zones – to the target, the Styrofoam square has three patterns of three holes, each of which could be covered by a quarter.
It's worth noting that Tyler does not especially like guns. He owns only a shotgun, which he has never shot and which he needed when he lived up in the hills of the Sierras with his wife and young daughter (he is recently divorced) as protection from meandering bears. He has never hunted, never killed an animal, never even shot at an animal.
Hemingway once wrote: "Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter." But that is not strictly the case for Tyler. He left the service voluntarily, because he felt his principles were being violated by a superior's decisions. It had to do with responsibility – his for the men under him. And he could not live with his conscience.
He admits he is still searching now, trying to come up with a lifestyle that embraces all that he is, all that he has done. Without a permanent address, he's basically living in his pickup truck. He's dating, and he wants to marry again, have more children, continue his art, and live "in a Mongolian yurt along the Pacific coast."
A nice vision. But it must coexist with Tyler's memory of, for instance, the first time he was fired upon in Baghdad: "We were in the back of a Humvee and I thought it was cigarette ashes flicked from a car. Heard nothing, had no idea where it was coming from. Just sparks skipping across stones." The man riding next to Tyler said, "Motherfucker! The turret guy just hit me in the back of the head with the turret!" But the turret was high up. He'd been shot in the neck. By a sniper.
A man, a thinking man, a philosophical man, chooses to be a sniper, to fight his war from a distance. And why would he do so?
Maybe because he can say this, as Scott Tyler does: "If you're shooting from 700 yards, you become the scope, you go down it, you become the tip of the bullet, you project yourself 700 yards. You're there."
There's a book out called "Wave", by Sri Lankan writer Sonali Deraniyagala. When the tsunami struck, on Boxing Day 2004, she lost her husband, her two sons and her parents. "Wave" is her memoir - there's an fascinating review of it here in the New York Times. The review also has the following quote, from Julian Barnes in Flaubert's Parrot, talking about grief and the attendant feelings and sensations that come with it:
“And you do come out of it, that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.”
He paints a powerful picture. It's a particularly visceral allegory. So I did a little digging to see what else Barnes has said on the subject - he's a fantastic writer - and scraped together some extracts from a piece he did in The New York Review of Books. It's a long comparison/review of two different books - A Widow's Story, by Joyce Carol Oates, and The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion. Here's an edit:
In his essay “The Proper Means of Regulating Sorrow,” Dr. Johnson identifies the dreadful uniqueness of grief among the human passions. Ordinary desires, virtuous or vicious, contain within them the theoretical possibility of their satisfaction:
The miser always imagines that there is a certain sum that will fill his heart to the brim; and every ambitious man, like King Pyrrhus, has an acquisition in his thoughts that is to terminate his labours, after which he shall pass the rest of his life in ease or gaity, in repose or devotion.
But grief, or “sorrow,” is different in kind. Even with painful passions—fear, jealousy, anger—nature always suggests to us a solution, and with it an end to that oppressive feeling:
But for sorrow there is no remedy provided by nature; it is often occasioned by accidents irreparable, and dwells upon objects that have lost or changed their existence; it requires what it cannot hope, that the laws of the universe should be repealed; that the dead should return, or the past should be recalled.
Unless we have a religious belief that envisages the total resurrection of the body, we know that we shall never see the lost loved again on terrestrial terms: never see, never talk and listen to, never touch, never hold. In the quarter of a millenium since Johnson described the unparalleled pain of grief, we—we in the secularizing West, at least—have got less good at dealing with death, and therefore with its emotional consequences. Of course, at one level we know that we shall all die; but death has come to be looked upon more as a medical failure than a human norm. It increasingly happens away from the home, in hospital, and is handled by a series of outside specialists—a matter for the professionals. But afterward we, the amateurs, the grief-struck, are left to deal with it—this unique, banal thing—as best we can. And there are now fewer social forms to surround and support the grief-bearer.
Very little is handed down from one generation to the next about what it is like. We are expected to suffer it in comparative silence; being “strong” is the template; wailing and weeping a sign of “giving in to grief,” which is held to be a bad way of “dealing with it.” Of course, there is the love of family and friends to fall back on, but they may know less than we do, and their concerned phrases— "It does get better”; “Two years is what they say”; “You are looking more yourself”—are often based on uncertain authority and general hopefulness. Death sorts people out: both the grief-bearers and those around them. As the survivor’s life is forcibly recalibrated, friendships are often tested; some pass, some fail. Co-grievers may indulge in the phenomenon of competitive mourning: I loved him/her more, and with these tears of mine I prove it. As for the sorrowing relicts—widow, widower, or unwed partner—they can become morbidly sensitive, easily moved to anger by both too much intrusiveness and too much distance-keeping. They may even experience a strange competitiveness of their own: an irrational need to prove (to whom?) that their grief is the larger, the heavier, the purer (than whose?).
A friend of mine, widowed in his sixties, told me, “This is a crappy age for it to happen.” Meaning, I think, that if the catastrophe had happened in his seventies, he could have settled in and waited for death; whereas if it had happened in his fifties, he might have been able to restart his life. But every age is a crappy age for it to happen, and there is no correct answer in that game of would-you-rather. How do you compare the grief of a young parent left with small children to that of an aged person amputated from his or her partner of fifty or sixty years? There is no hierarchy to grief, except in the matter of feeling. Another friend of mine, widowed in a moment after fifty years of marriage—the knot of people by a baggage carousel in the arrivals hall turned out to be surrounding her suddenly dead husband—wrote to me: “Nature is very exact in the matter. It hurts just as much as it is worth.”
Joan Didion had been married to John Gregory Dunne for forty years when he died in mid-sentence while on his second pre-dinner whisky in December 2003. Joyce Carol Oates and Raymond Smith had been together for “forty-seven years and twenty-five days” when Smith, in hospital but apparently recovering well from pneumonia, was swept away by a secondary infection in February 2008. Both literary couples were intensely close yet noncompetitive, often working in the same space and rarely apart: in the case of Didion-Dunne, for a “week or two or three here and there when one of us was doing a piece”; in the case of Oates-Smith, no more than a day or two.
The similarities continue: in each marriage the woman was the star; each of the dead husbands had been a lapsed Catholic; neither wife seems to have imagined in advance her transformation into widow; and each left her husband’s voice on the answering machine for some while after his death. Further, each survivor decided to chronicle her first year of widowhood, and each of their books was completed within those twelve months.
That both Didion and Oates limit their books to the first year of their widowhoods is logical. Long-married couples develop a certain rhythm, gravity, and coloration to the annual cycle, and so those first twelve months of widowhood propose at every turn a terrible choice: between doing the same as last year, only this time by yourself, or deliberately not doing the same as last year, and thereby perhaps feeling even more by yourself. That first year contains many stations of the cross. For instance, learning to return to a silent, empty house. Learning to avoid what Oates calls “sinkholes”—those “places fraught with visceral memory.” Learning how to balance necessary solitude and necessary gregariousness. Learning how to react to friends who mystifyingly decline to mention the name of the lost partner; or colleagues who fail to find the right words, like the “Princeton acquaintance” who greeted Oates “with an air of hearty reproach” and the line, “Writing up a storm, eh, Joyce?” Or like the woman friend who offers her the consolation that grief “is neurological. Eventually the neurons are ‘re-circuited.’ I would think that, if this is so, you could speed up the process by just knowing.”
The intention is kindly; the effect, patronizing. Oh, so it’s just a question of waiting for those neurons to settle? Then there are practical problems: for instance, the garden your husband lovingly tended, but in which you are less interested; you may enjoy the results, but rarely joined him in visits to the garden center. So do you faithfully replicate the same work, or do you unfaithfully let the garden look after itself? Here, Oates finds a wise third way: where Smith planted only annuals, she replants with nothing but perennials, asking the nurseryman for “anything that requires a minimum of work and is guaranteed to survive.”
Which is the problem confronting the widow: how to survive that first year, how to turn into a perennial. This involves surmounting fears and anxieties for which there is no training. Previously, Oates rated as “the most exquisite of intimacies” the ability to occupy the same space as Ray for hours, without the need to speak; now, there is a quite different order of silence. “What I am,” Oates writes, “begins to be revealed now that I am alone. In such revelation is terror.”
Oates excellently conveys the disconnect between the inwardly chaotic self and the outwardly functioning person (and she is functioning again with remarkable rapidity—correcting proofs and working on a story within a week of Smith’s death, back on the literary road within three). She is certainly less in control than she seems to outsiders, but probably more in control than she feels to herself.
Smith's opinions on the relationship between the sexes are somewhat unusual:
To a woman, the quintessential male is unknowable, elusive.
In our marriage it was our practice not to share anything that was upsetting, depressing, demoralizing, tedious—unless it was unavoidable.
Women are inclined to console men, all women, all men, in all circumstances without discretion.
The ideal marriage is of a writer and her/his editor.
A wife must respect her husband’s family even when—as it sometimes happens—her husband does not entirely respect them.
A wife must respect the otherness of her husband—she must accept it, she will never know him fully.
This sounds like shyness raised to marital principle; and it brings with it the danger that when the wife becomes a widow and goes through her husband’s papers, she will find out things she barely suspected. In Ray Smith’s case: a nervous breakdown, a love affair at a sanatarium, a psychiatrist’s description of him as “love-starved,” and further evidence of a difficult, distant relationship with his father. “For all that I knew Ray so well,” she concludes, “I didn’t know hisimagination.” Nor, perhaps, did he know hers, given that he rarely read her fiction. But he was “the first man in my life, the last man, the only man.”
In some ways, autobiographical accounts of grief are unfalsifiable, and therefore unreviewable by any normal criteria. The book is repetitive? So is grief. The book is obsessive? So is grief. The book is at times incoherent? So is grief. Phrases like “Friends have been wonderful inviting me to their homes” are platitudes; but grief is filled with platitudes. The chapter headed “Fury!” begins:
Then suddenly, I am so angry. I am so very very angry, I am furious. I am sick with fury, like a wounded animal.
If a creative writing student turned this in as part of a story, the professor might reach for her red pencil; but if that same professor is writing a stream-of-consciousness diary about grief, the paragraph becomes strangely validated. This is how it feels, and what is grief at times but a car crash of cliché?
Grief dislocates both space and time. The grief-struck find themselves in a new geography, where other people’s maps are only ever approximate. Time also ceases to be reliable. C.S. Lewis, in A Grief Observed, describes the effect on him of his wife’s death:
Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness.
And this unreliability of time adds to the confusion in the sorrower’s mind as to whether grief is a state or a process. This is far from a theoretical matter. It is at the heart of the question: Will it always be like this? Will things get better? Why should they? And if so, how will I tell? Lewis admits that when he started writing his book,
I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process. It needs not a map but a history.
Probably, it needs both at the same time. We might try to pin it down by saying that grief is the state and mourning the process; yet to the person enduring one or both, things are rarely clear, and the “process” is one that involves much slipping back into the paralysis of the “state.” There are various markers: the point at which tears—regular, daily tears—stop; the point when the brain returns to normal functioning; the point when possessions are disposed of; the point when memory of the lost one begins to return. But there can be no general rules, nor standard time-scale. Those pesky neurons just can’t be relied upon.
What happens next, when the state and the process are, if by no means complete, at least established and recognizable? What happens to our heart? Again, there are those confident surrounding voices (from “How could he/she ever marry again after living with her/him?” to “They say the happily married tend to remarry quickly, often within six months”). A friend whose long-term lover had died of AIDS told me, “There’s only one upside to this thing: you can do what you fucking well like.” The trouble is that when you are in sorrow, most notions of “what you like” will contain the presence of your lost love and the impossible demand that the laws of the universe be repealed. And so: a hunkering-down, a closing-off, a retreat into the posthumous faithfulness of memory? Raymond Smith didn’t much like Dr. Johnson, finding him too didactic, and preferring the Doctor of Boswell’s account to that of his own writings. But on sorrow, Johnson is not so much didactic as wise, clear, and decisive:
An attempt to preserve life in a state of neutrality and indifference, is unreasonable and vain. If by excluding joy we could shut out grief, the scheme would deserve very serious attention; but since however we may debar our lives from happiness, misery will find its way at many inlets, and the assaults of pain will force our regard, though we may withhold it from the invitations of pleasure, we may surely endeavour to raise life above the middle point of apathy at one time, since it will necessarily sink below it at another.
So what constitutes “success” in mourning? The ability to return to concentration and work; the ability to rediscover interest in life, and take pleasure in it, while recognizing that present pleasure is far from past joy. The ability to hold the lost love successfully in mind, remembering without distorting. The ability to continue living as he or she would have wanted you to do (though this is a tricky area, where the sorrowful can often end up giving themselves a free pass). And then what? Some form of self-sufficiency that avoids neutrality and indifference? Or a new relationship that will either supplant the lost one or, perhaps, draw strength from it?
When Dr. Johnson wrote “The Proper Means of Regulating Sorrow” he was not yet widowed. That event was to occur two years later, when he was forty-three. Twenty-eight years afterward, in a letter to Dr. Thomas Lawrence, whose wife had recently died, Johnson wrote:
He that outlives a wife whom he has long loved, sees himself disjoined from the only mind that has the same hopes, and fears, and interest; from the only companion with whom he has shared much good or evil; and with whom he could set his mind at liberty, to retrace the past or anticipate the future. The continuity of being is lacerated; the settled course of sentiment and action is stopped; and life stands suspended and motionless, till it is driven by external causes into a new channel. But the time of suspense is dreadful.
[youtube=http://youtu.be/Fypi6dAJB8E&w=700]
Once a year, the Big Apple hosts a unique dinner — the annual gala of the Explorer’s Club. The highlight of the evening is the cocktail hour, where the finger food might have legs, a face, or even a tongue.
[youtube=http://youtu.be/zjV6GF-Qmvw&w=700]
[youtube=http://youtu.be/svxJRTsRVtk&w=700] Thx Adam.
Oh, and if you liked that...
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcCHRW8G9yY&w=700]
Great piece by J Peder Zane in The New York Times. Wish I'd thought of it: In Pursuit of Taste, en Masse AMERICANS didn’t always ask so many questions or expect so much in their quest for enjoyment. It was enough for them simply to savor a good cigar, a nice bottle of wine or a tasty morsel of cheese.
Not anymore. Driven by a relentless quest for “the best,” we increasingly see every item we place in our grocery basket or Internet shopping cart as a reflection of our discrimination and taste. We are not consumers. We have a higher calling. We are connoisseurs.
Connoisseurship has never been more popular. Long confined to the serious appreciation of high art and classical music, it is now applied to an endless cascade of pursuits. Leading publications, including The New York Times, routinely discuss the connoisseurship of coffee, cupcakes and craft beers; of cars, watches, fountain pens, lunchboxes, stereo systems and computers; of tacos, pizza, pickles, chocolate, mayonnaise, cutlery and light (yes, light, which is not to be confused with the specialized connoisseurship of lighting). And the Grateful Dead, of course.
This democratization of connoisseurship is somewhat surprising since as recently as the social upheavals of the 1960s and ’70s connoisseurship was a “dirty word” — considered “elitist, artificial, subjective and mostly imaginary,” said Laurence B. Kanter, chief curator of the Yale University Art Gallery. Today, it is a vital expression of how many of us we want to see, and distinguish, ourselves.
As its wide embrace opens a window onto the culture and psychology of contemporary America, it raises an intriguing question: If almost anything can be an object of connoisseurship — and if, by implication, almost anyone can be a connoisseur — does the concept still suggest the fine and rare qualities that make it so appealing?
There were probably Neanderthals who tried to distinguish themselves through their exquisite taste in cave drawings. But the word connoisseur was not coined until the 18th century — in France, of course, as a symbol of the Enlightenment’s increasingly scientific approach to knowledge.
At a time when precious little was known about the provenance of many works of art, early connoisseurs developed evaluative tools — for example, identifying an artist’s typical subject matter, use of color and use of light — to authenticate works by revered masters and to debunk pretenders to the pedestal.
“Works of art do not carry a guarantee,” said Dr. Kanter. “It has always been the job of the connoisseur to question, investigate, refine the received wisdom of earlier generations.”
As the aristocracy declined and the bourgeoisie enjoyed new wealth, especially after the Napoleonic upheavals, the number of people who could afford art expanded, as did the types of art they were interested in. Connoisseurship grew in response to the need for authoritative guidance in a changing world. In the 19th century, connoisseurs helped reassess the works of forgotten artists, like Giotto, Fra Angelico and Botticelli, who are now considered canonical. They studied and appraised ignored forms like German woodcuts, French porcelain and English statuary.
Contemporary efforts to apply connoisseurship to a host of far-flung fields are consistent with this history. “Our definition of quality continues to expand and mature,” Dr. Kanter said, “so it makes sense that we can talk now about connoisseurs not just of art but also of rap music, comic books and Scotch. Connoisseurship is not about objects; it’s a process of thinking about and making distinctions among things.”
True connoisseurs — and this is what makes the label so appealing — do not merely possess knowledge, like scholars. They possess a sixth sense called taste. They are renowned for the unerring judgment of their discerning eye. They are celebrated because of their rare talent — their gift — for identifying and appreciating subtle, often hidden, qualities.
Despite its expanded applications, connoisseurship still revolves around art, if we define art broadly as things that are more than the sum of their parts because they offer the possibility of transcendence. We do not speak of connoisseurs of nature (which can transport us) or diapers (which are simply useful). But no one blinks when we apply the term to wine, food or literary forms like comic books, because these are believed to offer deeper experiences to those who can gain access to them. Generally speaking, almost anyone can become an expert, but connoisseurship means we’re special.
If connoisseurship is a way of thinking, its rising popularity reflects the fact that people have so many more things to think about. ` Robert H. Frank, a professor of economics at Cornell whose books include “Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess,” noted that the British economist John Maynard Keynes worried during the 1920s and ’30s that rising productivity would lead people to work less as it became easier to satisfy their basic needs.
“It’s funny,” Dr. Frank said, “that someone as smart as he was didn’t realize that we would invent a million new things to spend our money on and create higher and higher standards of quality for those products that would cost more and more.”
Hence the $5 cup of coffee and the $8 pickle.
In the dark ages before arugula, most supermarkets seemed to carry only one type of lettuce, iceberg, and apples were either green or red. In 1945, the average grocer carried about 5,000 products; today, that number is more than 40,000, according to Paul B. Ellickson, a professor of economics and marketing at the University of Rochester.
In addition, the Internet has made millions of other options just a mouse click away. Easy access to higher-quality products opens new avenues of connoisseurship — gorau glas cheese is more interesting, more provocative, than Velveeta. But it also presents us with a mind-numbing series of choices. In this context, connoisseurship is a coping strategy. When we say we want “the best,” we winnow our options, focusing our attention on a small sample of highly regarded items.
Put another way, rising connoisseurship is a response to life in an age of information shaped by consumerism. As ideas increasingly become the coin of the realm, people distinguish themselves by what they know. An important way to demonstrate this is through what they buy.
It is a form of conspicuous consumption that puts less emphasis on an item’s price tag — craft beers aren’t that expensive — than on its perceived cachet. In hoisting a Tripel brewed by Belgian monks, the drinker is telling the world: I know which ale to quaff. As, in all fairness, he enjoys a very tasty beverage.
Ironically, many items celebrated as examples of connoisseurship — handcrafted, small-batch, artisanal products — are themselves a reaction against the mass production trends of the global consumer society that shapes us. Just as art connoisseurs authenticate paintings, others seek wines and cheese and cupcakes that seem mystically authentic.
“A lot of what gets called connoisseurship is really just snobbery,” said Thomas Frank, who has dissected modern consumer culture in books like “Commodify Your Dissent,” which he edited with Matt Weiland, and “The Conquest of Cool.” “It’s not about the search for quality, but buying things that make you feel good about yourself. It’s about standing apart from the crowd, demonstrating knowledge, hipness.”
The rub is that, as access to knowledge through a Google search has become synonymous with possessing knowledge, fewer and fewer people seem to have the inclination or patience to become true connoisseurs. How many people, after all, have the time to make oodles of money and master the worlds of craft beer, cheese, wines and everything else people in the know must know?
In response, most people outsource connoisseurship, turning to actual connoisseurs for guidance. “Many people want the patina of connoisseurship on the cheap,” said Barry Schwartz, a professor of social theory and social action at Swarthmore College. “So they contract out the decision-making process. My guess is that a tiny fraction of people who are true connoisseurs of wine — and there are some — don’t make enough money to buy a $500 bottle of wine.”
As Steven Jenkins, an expert on cheese and other products at Fairway Market in New York, recently told a reporter for The New York Times: “The customer has no idea what he or she wants. The customer is dying to be told what they want.”
People have always relied on connoisseurs for guidance. What is different today is the idea — suggested by journalists and marketers intent on flattering their customers — that people can become paragons of taste simply by taking someone else’s advice.
Dr. Schwartz said this could be a wise strategy. Consumers may not get the pleasures of deep knowledge, but they also avoid the angst. “You get the benefits of discernment without paying the psychological price” of having to make difficult choices and distinctions, he said. “You’re happy because you’ve been told what to get and don’t know any better.”
This psychological dimension is essential to understanding connoisseurship, said Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University whose books include “Predictably Irrational.” While recognizing that a small handful of people are true connoisseurs, he said his experiments with people interested in wine revealed a startling lack of discernment.
In one experiment, Dr. Ariely asked people to taste and write descriptions of four wines. He waited 10 minutes and then gave them a blind taste test, asking them to match the wines to their descriptions. For the most part, they couldn’t.
In another experiment, he used food coloring to make white wine appear red. The participants, he said, “rated it highly in terms of tannins, complexity” and other general characteristics of red wine.
Dr. Ariely’s work dovetails with other experiments that have found, for instance, that many people cannot tell the difference between foie gras and dog food in blind taste tests.
Even connoisseurs have a hard time getting it right. Echoing a famous blind taste test of wines from California and France in 1976, known as the Judgment of Paris, nine wine experts gathered at Princeton University in 2012 to compare revered wines from France with wines from New Jersey that cost, on average, about 5 percent as much. Not only did the experts give vastly different scores for many of the wines, but they rated the Garden State wines on a par with their costly French counterparts.
Dr. Ariely said these results did not necessarily debunk the notion of connoisseurship. “Whether we can actually tell the difference between cheap and expensive wine may be less important than whether we think that we can,” he said. “We might actually experience more pleasure when drinking an expensive wine, enjoy it more, because we’re slowing down, savoring it, paying more attention to its qualities.”
Which, as it turns out, is a hallmark of connoisseurship.
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/58933055 w=700&h=390]
Fascinating post from Kottke...I wish I could say I was more shocked, but the sad thing is I'm not even surprised: Michael Moss is a Pulitzer-winning investigative journalist for the NY Times and he's written a book called Salt Sugar Fat.
From a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter at The New York Times comes the explosive story of the rise of the processed food industry and its link to the emerging obesity epidemic. Michael Moss reveals how companies use salt, sugar, and fat to addict us and, more important, how we can fight back.
Every year, the average American eats thirty-three pounds of cheese (triple what we ate in 1970) and seventy pounds of sugar (about twenty-two teaspoons a day). We ingest 8,500 milligrams of salt a day, double the recommended amount, and almost none of that comes from the shakers on our table. It comes from processed food. It's no wonder, then, that one in three adults, and one in five kids, is clinically obese. It's no wonder that twenty-six million Americans have diabetes, the processed food industry in the U.S. accounts for $1 trillion a year in sales, and the total economic cost of this health crisis is approaching $300 billion a year.
Moss researched the book for four years, interviewing hundreds of current and former processed-food industry employees and reviewing thousands of pages of industry memos. This weekend's NY Times Magazine has a lengthy excerpt from the book that's well worth a read.
Eventually, a line of the [Lunchables] trays, appropriately called Maxed Out, was released that had as many as nine grams of saturated fat, or nearly an entire day's recommended maximum for kids, with up to two-thirds of the max for sodium and 13 teaspoons of sugar.
When I asked Geoffrey Bible, former C.E.O. of Philip Morris, about this shift toward more salt, sugar and fat in meals for kids, he smiled and noted that even in its earliest incarnation, Lunchables was held up for criticism. "One article said something like, 'If you take Lunchables apart, the most healthy item in it is the napkin.' "
Well, they did have a good bit of fat, I offered. "You bet," he said. "Plus cookies."
The prevailing attitude among the company's food managers - through the 1990s, at least, before obesity became a more pressing concern - was one of supply and demand. "People could point to these things and say, 'They've got too much sugar, they've got too much salt,' " Bible said. "Well, that's what the consumer wants, and we're not putting a gun to their head to eat it. That's what they want. If we give them less, they'll buy less, and the competitor will get our market. So you're sort of trapped." (Bible would later press Kraft to reconsider its reliance on salt, sugar and fat.)
And this is classic processed food as molecular gastronomy right here:
I brought him two shopping bags filled with a variety of chips to taste. He zeroed right in on the Cheetos. "This," Witherly said, "is one of the most marvelously constructed foods on the planet, in terms of pure pleasure." He ticked off a dozen attributes of the Cheetos that make the brain say more. But the one he focused on most was the puff's uncanny ability to melt in the mouth. "It's called vanishing caloric density," Witherly said. "If something melts down quickly, your brain thinks that there's no calories in it... you can just keep eating it forever."
(via @bryce)
[gallery ids="5862,5863,5864,5865,5866,5867"]
French photographer & origami wizard Philippe Pétremant is the creative individual behind these rolled up bank notes that create a collage of some of the most recognized political figures in modern times. Using bank notes from around the world, he’s twisted, contorted & folded them together adding in a paper clip to keep them in place. The end result is a series of amusing portraits title Les Sept Mercenaires, that are as unique as they are ingenious.Although playful and subversive, we think Pétremant‘s true gift is being able to blur the lines between what is credible and what clearly isn’t….
(Via)
[youtube=http://youtu.be/Sa9BQKlUKek&w=700] Excellent.
[youtube=http://youtu.be/HFT7ATLQQx8&w=700] Eruptive events on the sun can be wildly different. Some come just with a solar flare, some with an additional ejection of solar material called a coronal mass ejection (CME), and some with complex moving structures in association with changes in magnetic field lines that loop up into the sun's atmosphere, the corona.
On July 19, 2012, an eruption occurred on the sun that produced all three. A moderately powerful solar flare exploded on the sun's lower right hand limb, sending out light and radiation. Next came a CME, which shot off to the right out into space. And then, the sun treated viewers to one of its dazzling magnetic displays -- a phenomenon known as coronal rain.
Over the course of the next day, hot plasma in the corona cooled and condensed along strong magnetic fields in the region. Magnetic fields, themselves, are invisible, but the charged plasma is forced to move along the lines, showing up brightly in the extreme ultraviolet wavelength of 304 Angstroms, which highlights material at a temperature of about 50,000 Kelvin. This plasma acts as a tracer, helping scientists watch the dance of magnetic fields on the sun, outlining the fields as it slowly falls back to the solar surface.
The footage in this video was collected by the Solar Dynamics Observatory's AIA instrument. SDO collected one frame every 12 seconds, and the movie plays at 30 frames per second, so each second in this video corresponds to 6 minutes of real time. The video covers 12:30 a.m. EDT to 10:00 p.m. EDT on July 19, 2012. Music: "Thunderbolt" by Lars Leonhard, courtesy of artist.
When you sit across from me Sipping your cup of milky earl grey I know you are noticing Those rusty slivers of heme Dulling my nails There from when I scratched his eyes out You casually study the bulge in my pocket Where those eyes lose their moisture And their retinas are fading from cornflower to haze Oh how I covet Your superior skills of detection You restless sage with your blended persona Part teapot, part Mainer, part immigrant entertainer Though your lips are thin Your smile is pleasing And I hope to endear as many when I solve nefarious murders And publish a succession of books
Good post by Sarah Marshall on The Hairpin. All its missing is the ad campaigns. Highlights include: Wool of the King by Lana Del Rey: Imitation gold is overwhelmed by corrosive notes of Mountain Dew, gas station bathroom hand sanitizer, and chlorine. Spritz it on your angora sweaters, your dogeared copy of Lolita, or your money!
Sherlocked by Benedict Cumberbatch: Notes of the finest bergamot and saffron mingle with the overpowering aromas of black tea, gunpowder, and clammy bedsheets, in a fragrance that works best when applied to the nape of the neck and shielded from cold air by a fashionable scarf. May incite homosexual urges, in both the wearer and those immediately around him.
Steve Buscemi Eyes by Steve Buscemi: Notes of menthol and ylang ylang on a whiskey base. Banned in Utah.
Goldbloom by Jeff Goldblum: This fragrance, meant to be drizzled down the wearer’s forearm (preferably while in a moving car) is redolent of warm eyeglasses, tanning oil, and Velociraptor musk. Perfect for work or leisure.
Wintour Harvest by Anna Wintour: Peppery, balsamic, indecisive, and fresh. Notes of warm blood and Galliano Sequin enliven this fragrance designed for the gal on the go.
Fryday I’m in Love by Stephen Fry: Well-worn corduroy mixes with notes of mahogany, pear brandy, and stilton in this comfortable, woody blend. Perfect to wear while reading Dickens or lecturing friends on Salic law. Caution: will make the wearer almost unbearably delightful.
Original post here.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRbLicNOvzY&w=700] Thanks for the heads up, Jadell.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0PMq4XGtZ4&w=700] "Vesti la giubba" is the conclusion of the first act, when Canio discovers his wife's infidelity, but must nevertheless prepare for his performance as Pagliaccio the clown because "The show must go on".
The aria is often regarded as one of the most moving in the operatic repertoire of the time. The pain of Canio is portrayed in the aria and exemplifies the entire notion of the "tragic clown": smiling on the outside but crying on the inside. This is still displayed today, as the clown motif often features the painted-on tear running down the cheek of the performer.
The 1904 recording by Enrico Caruso was the first million-selling record in history.
Recitar! Mentre preso dal delirio, non so più quel che dico, e quel che faccio! Eppur è d'uopo, sforzati! Bah! Sei tu forse un uom? Tu se' Pagliaccio!
Vesti la giubba, e la faccia infarina. La gente paga, e rider vuole qua. E se Arlecchin t'invola Colombina, ridi, Pagliaccio, e ognun applaudirà! Tramuta in lazzi lo spasmo ed il pianto in una smorfia il singhiozzo e 'l dolor, Ah!
Ridi, Pagliaccio, sul tuo amore infranto! Ridi del duol, che t'avvelena il cor!
+
Act! While in delirium, I no longer know what I say, or what I do! And yet it's necessary... make an effort! Bah! Are you not a man? You are a clown!
Put on your costume, powder your face. The people pay to be here, and they want to laugh. And if Harlequin shall steal your Columbina, laugh, clown, so the crowd will cheer! Turn your distress and tears into jest, your pain and sobbing into a funny face – Ah!
Laugh, clown, at your broken love! Laugh at the grief that poisons your heart!