Note: New site may not appear exactly as shown

Well, I’ve finally completed a long deferred project: Archipelagoes has moved to a paid hosting provider and now has both its own domain name (www.iangarrickmason.com) and a fresh design. The new site will be my primary location on the web, though of course I’ll maintain the same cross-posting relationship with sans everything, and my plan is to move my existing published articles archive there as well. I’ve already transferred all of the past postings and comments from this current site to the new one, so there’s no need to return here to look something up.

That said, please go visit the new place, update your bookmarks, and don’t be afraid to bring some flowers or a nice housewarming gift.

Joaquin Phoenix and Vinessa Shaw in James Gray's Two Lovers

Leonard Kraditor (Joaquin Phoenix) does not on the face of it seem like the kind of man who would end up with two attractive lovers at the same time. He is in his mid-thirties and lives with his parents. He works as a delivery man for his father’s antiquated dry cleaning business. He takes black and white photographs as a hobby, but shoots only buildings. He takes medication for a variety of bipolar disorder. And in the opening scene of the film, he attempts to commit suicide (not for the first time, his worried parents remind themselves) by jumping off a pier.

Yet two lovers he has. The first, Sandra Cohen (Vinessa Shaw), is the pretty and good-hearted daughter of the man who is purchasing the Kraditor’s dry cleaning business. Both families are keen to see their children together; not only would a marriage cement the long-term business relationship, but Leonard and Sandra seem almost equally unlucky in love, and are all but pushed together by well-meaning parents who genuinely want them to be happy. And all signs do point to the fact that Leonard and Sandra would indeed be a good match.

Leonard, however, has also met the wrong kind of woman. Michelle Rausch (Gwyneth Paltrow), a shiksa that has sprung fully-blond from out of a Philip Roth novel, is a neighbour who takes refuge in Leonard’s family apartment in order to escape her ranting, half-crazy father. She is a bundle of problems: a legal assistant involved in a self-destructive affair with a partner of the firm (making it worse, she lives in an apartment he rents for her, and so has become his dependent), a former drug abuser now sliding back into her habit, and a woman obsessed with the fantasy that her lover will one day leave his family and run off with her.

Michelle adopts Leonard as a friend and confidant, blinding herself – perhaps intentionally – to the all-too-obvious fact that Leonard has fallen in love with her. In Michelle, he believes he has found a love to replace the fiance taken from him by parents worried about his mental stability. His new object of passion is as deeply flawed as he is, and, what is more, he can help her. He proves himself, again and again, more loyal, more faithful, and more loving than the rich sophisticated lawyer – doing so with an intensity that would be off-putting to any woman marginally less self-absorbed than Michelle.

His reward, inevitably, is a series of humiliations. Michelle invites him to dinner with her lover, Ronald Blatt (Elias Koteas), so that as a man (so she reasons) he can give her a ruling on whether Ronald is serious about her and will really leave his wife and child. Leonard arrives early and spends a number of minutes fidgeting at the table, ordering a brandy alexander (Ronald’s favourite drink) and then attempting to drink it through the mixing straw. “Would you like me to bring you a real straw?”, asks the waiter, matter-of-factly. “No, this is perfect,” Leonard bluffs, repressing what must be an agony of embarrassment. Later, Leonard rushes to Michelle’s side during a surprise miscarriage, taking her to the hospital and bringing her home again. He visits her the next day, only to be forced to hide behind her bedroom door when Ronald arrives unexpectedly, begging forgiveness for not being able to leave his wife the day before to see Michelle in hospital. She refuses to tell her lover what has happened, and sends him away – yet though Leonard is favoured with secret knowledge, it is clear that his own status is both subordinate to Ronald’s and undeclarable. “That was weird,” he says nonchalantly after Ronald has left. He is bluffing again.

A quiet work of tragic beauty – a work heightened by the honesty of its acting and the all-too-human limitations of its characters – Two Lovers is both a film about two lovers, and a film about two kinds of love – or perhaps more accurately, about two versions of the same kind of love. The love that Sandra feels for Leonard is a wifely version of the love that his parents have for him: it is benevolent, affectionate, protective, enduring. Sandra holds his hands over lunch one day, and notices deep scars on his wrists. Leonard pulls back in embarrassment, but Sandra seems both aware and accepting of his condition and his past. “I want to take care of you,” she says, and though spoken from the heart, her offer falls on deaf ears; he has been thinking too distractedly of Michelle throughout lunch, about her problems. Futile also – at least in the moment of expression – are the genuine attempts by his parents to help him. His father explains to him at the dinner table that he is merging his company with Cohen’s in order to give Leonard a future, and steady health insurance. It’s banal, but it really is love.

“It smells like moth balls”, Michelle observes innocently, upon entering the Kraditors’ apartment for the first and only time. The cosy family home is alien territory to her, and she passes through without changing it or being changed. She carries her home universe with her, she the magnetic sun at its centre, Leonard a candidate satellite. As she careens by his life, he senses in her a chance to escape his own past. By taking care of her, he would no longer be the wounded son in need of help. The roles would reverse; she the weak, needy, and confused, he the strong and wise. The bright light of this obsession, of this obsessive possibility, is what casts Sandra and her goodness into the shade. Leonard simply can’t see her for the glare.

A moment of great rejoicing for human rights activists and champions of the rule of law came at the beginning of this month as former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori was sentenced to 25 years in jail for “crimes against humanity”, having authorized murders, kidnappings, and torture as part of a severe anti-terrorist campaign in the 1990s. Fujimori’s sentencing, one must hope, will send a powerful message to government leaders around the world that maintaining public security is an insufficient excuse for violating fundamental human rights, and that even presidents will be held to account for the crimes they commit in office.

But not in America.

Not because there is nothing to prosecute. On the contrary: in the years following the 9/11 attacks, both a president and a vice president of the United States initiated, oversaw, attempted to cover up and then to justify a program of interrogation that was based on torture, in violation both of domestic U.S. law and of the country’s international treaty obligations. In December, former vice president Dick Cheney casually admitted to ABC News his role in authorizing techniques like waterboarding, a technique which the Obama administration’s attorney general, Eric Holder, would later tell Congress is undoubtably a form of torture. This interrogation program was approved by top administration lawyers and carried out by employees of the CIA.

By implementing such a program, the United States became a torture state, a classification borne at different times by countries like Iran, Argentina, Chile, and the Soviet Union. Worse, it did so with the largely tacit — but quite real — support of much of its population. But President Barack Obama has apparently decided that the stain of torture should remain on society’s skin — not washed away, but simply ignored. As part of a release of classified CIA documents relating to torture, Obama announced in his now-familiar poetic diction, “This is a time for reflection, not retribution. We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history. But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.”

There is nothing that eternally optimistic Americans like better than moving on swiftly from unpleasant situations, so the president’s mellifluous proposal will doubtless meet with little opposition from the man in the street. But he is wrong to declare that “nothing will be gained”. Prosecutions would do several things. They would ensure that justice is done and is seen to be done, and would thus restore respect for the rule of law. They would publicly reinforce American society’s shared sense of right and wrong. They would dispel the cynicism that flourishes when power is unchecked and the force of the law is seen to apply only to the common people. They would prevent denial and myth from forming a crust under which a country’s authentic history would find itself buried. They would deter potential torturers in the future. And to the world, they would signal America’s intent to return to Enlightenment principles upon which it was founded.

Obama may think that this decision is based on a tough-minded political realism. But that hard logic should only apply to the removal of dictators in foreign countries who would otherwise cling tenaciously to power if threatened with prosecution for their crimes. In such cases, a society may reasonably opt to deny justice in order to peacefully achieve democracy. But in America, in 2009, no such trade-off is required. The Bush administration was not a dictatorship, but the elected government of the world’s most powerful democracy; there was no hint that it would refuse to give up power after November’s vote. Obama’s “realism” is based on an unnecessary and absurdly one-sided bargain: the denial of justice in return for the morale of CIA agents.

The contrast with the moral and political example set recently by Peru could not be more stark. In the 1980s and 90s Peru faced not one but two significant insurgencies: a guerrilla campaign mounted by the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), and a separate terrorist/guerrilla campaign mounted by the Maoist Sendero Luminoso (“Shining Path”). By the early 1990s, large swathes of rural Peru had slipped away from government control, and it is no exaggeration to say that the Peruvian state faced an existential threat.

President Fujimori, a man of clearly authoritarian tendencies who shut down Peru’s Congress and hobbled its justice system in favour of untrammelled executive power, relied on the support of an urban-based public that applauded his hardline stance and demanded an end to the insurgencies. When Peru’s police forces did not produce results fast enough, Fujimori sent in the military. Army units intimidated villagers, fighting a grim battle with the insurgents not so much for the hearts and minds but for the submissive obedience of the rural population. Fujimori also authorized the creation of military death squads, who kidnapped, tortured, and murdered suspects. Noted the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2003:

57. The TRC has established that the most serious human rights violations by military agents were: extrajudicial executions, forced disappearance of persons, torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. The TRC particularly condemns the extensive practice of sexual violence against women. All these acts constitute a dishonor for those who perpetrated them directly and for those who, in their position of hierarchical superiors, instigated, permitted or covered them up with mechanisms of impunity.

Patient police and intelligence work eventually won out, and Abimael Guzmán, the leader of the cult-like Shining Path, was arrested and tried in late 1992. By 1997 both insurgencies had sputtered out, and peace finally returned to Peru after decades of war. Fujimori was removed from office in 2000 following a serious corruption scandal involving his chief of intelligence, Vladimiro Montesinos, who was caught on film trying to bribe a congressman into switching sides. Peru’s subsequent administrations, rather than declaring that “nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past”, put the former president on trial for serious violations of human rights. And has now put him in jail.

Any war against terrorists is invariably frustrating for a state and its police and soldiers. The temptation to “take the gloves off” is ever-present, and the sanctions and principle of the rule of law are often the only things preventing a given government from crossing that line. Yet the rule of law only has power — indeed, it only exists — if it is acted upon as systematically and as apolitically as possible. Decide to ignore significant crimes for political reasons and the law is turned into a harmless ghost.

Peruvian society, under mortal threat over many years of war, made some serious mistakes, blessing a government’s incipient authoritarianism and supporting its slide into state-sanctioned terror. But once it had removed that government from power, Peru quickly moved to restore belief in the rule of law by trying and punishing its former chief executive and his head of intelligence. “[T]his ruling is an historic step in the fight against impunity, not just in Peru but in Latin America,” said a legal advisor to Amnesty International. “It sends a clear message that impunity will not be tolerated in the future.”

Under the pressure of 9/11, American society made serious mistakes too. But President Obama’s recent decisions mean that for high crimes of state, the rule of law is now an irrelevancy. They mean that whenever the American state feels threatened, we should expect that it will act increasingly ruthlessly, since no credible threat of future punishment will exist to keep its agents or its officers of state in check. They mean that into the indefinite future, a group of Americans who have earned their pay cheques as state torturers will continue to be employed by the government. Worst of all, it means that almost inevitably, and perhaps not too long from now, they’ll be earning pay cheques again for such evil work.

An Afghan woman and her daughter grieve after an air strike in Shindand district last summer. Photograph: Fraidoon Pooyaa/AP

A very interesting article appears today in the Independent, discussing some policy concessions proposed by representatives of the Taliban who have been quietly negotiating with Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s government. Among the proposals: a commitment to refrain from banning the education of girls, measuring the length of beards, or making the wearing of burqas compulsory.

This puts in a new context yesterday’s revelation that President Karzai recently signed a law that codifies the rights of Afghanistan’s Shi’as to be governed by family law based on traditional Shi’a jurisprudence, which (it is believed, since the law itself has not yet been publicly released) prevents women from refusing to have sex with their husbands or leaving the house without their husbands’ permission.

Immediate commentary saw purely political motives behind Karzai’s signature, labelling it a blatant appeal for electoral support from Shi’as (who make up roughly 20% of the population – the Guardian article claims 10% for some reason), and specifically from the Hazaras (who are themselves predominantly Shi’a and who, as the third largest ethnic group in the country behind Pashtuns and Tajiks, represent a powerful swing vote). But perhaps Karzai was also sending kind of signal to the Taliban, attempting to reassure them that the future of a peaceful Afghanistan will be a traditional and religious one, not one in which the country has become a Central Asian version of Orlando, Florida.

Liberals are outraged at what they see as Karzai’s backsliding. Marc Malloch Brown, the UK’s Foreign Office minister for Africa, Asia, and the UN, declared that “The rights of women was one of the reasons the UK and many in the West threw ourselves into the struggle in Afghanistan. It matters greatly to us and our public opinion.” This is true, as far as it goes, and indeed the Afghan war in this sense represents a kind of temporary rebirth of the Cold War consensus that existed (most of the time) between internationalist liberals and anti-communist conservatives: liberals are happy to champion the war insofar as it frees benighted foreigners from medieval traditions, and conservatives are happy to champion women’s rights insofar as it gives them carte blanche to kill terrorists and demonstrate American military prowess.

Yet both of these motives are quite literally foreign to the actual residents of Afghanistan, who must somehow conceive of and then implement a peace process that will result in a government that is neither extremely religious, extremely corrupt, nor extremely oppressive — but one which, when all is said and done, will likely be at least moderately religious, corrupt, and oppressive. Standing in the way of achieving this humble goal has been the Taliban’s unrealistic hope of returning to power and re-establishing a zealous and puritan rule, and the West’s unrealistic hope of turning Afghanistan into a pluralist liberal democracy with all the mod cons.

But military stalemate has had a salutary effect on both sides, forcing positions gradually to soften. To those who believe in unconditional surrender, talk of compromise sounds treasonous. Yet it is just this spirit of compromise against a backdrop of stalemate that eventually tamed the Irish Republican Army. Neither extreme Loyalists like Ian Paisley nor extreme Republicans like the “Real IRA” were pleased with the compromises being made, but everyone else was — a fact that enabled Northern Ireland to find its way to peace after decades of insurgency.

Similarly, peace will one day come to Afghanistan, and the compromises that make it possible will also, almost certainly, make a lot of people unhappy. Depending on the goals we had for the war, peace may even feel a little bit like defeat. But any such unhappy peace will be preferable, for the people that really matter, to continued war. The campaign in Afghanistan, which began as an attempt to topple the Taliban government and capture Osama bin Laden, has gone on for nearly eight years now, and has lead to the deaths of tens of thousands of Afghan civilians. Our ends do not justify such destructive means. So when our governments tell us that we’re fighting in Afghanistan to ensure that little girls can go to school, we should balance this claim against the following basic truth.

War doesn’t educate little girls; it kills them.

A prominent literary editor once told me that a good reviewer did not have to like every book that he read, but that he absolutely had to have the capacity to like every book. In this spirit, I make a habit of opening a new book with the greatest optimism and eagerness, convinced that I’ll enjoy both the process of reading it and the comparative chore of writing the review itself.

It doesn’t always come to pass, of course. Fortunately, most books I’ve reviewed have been fascinating and well-written. A minority have turned out to be well-conceived and reasonably well-executed, but significantly flawed in logic or perspective (of course, in some ways these are more fun to review, since they offer more room for argument). But only one book so far has made me want to give up and put it away, and this before I had read even a third of it. To clarify, it’s not an atrocious book at all, but rather one that again and again refuses to rise to its own potential. And that can be a more painful experience than it sounds.

Hooked (and how could you not be)? Then by all means, read on…

Aladdin’s Lamp: How Greek Science Came to Europe Through the Islamic World
By John Freely
(Alfred A. Knopf; 303 pages; $27.95)

Review published in the San Francisco Chronicle (March 22, 2009)

After nearly eight years of conflict in the Middle East and Central Asia, it is hard to say that the American public is much more knowledgeable about the Islamic world than before the war began.

Admittedly, “Lawrence of Arabia”-style imaginings of desert sheikhs and bejeweled camels have been updated to include suicide bombers, beheadings and oppressed women in burqas, but this is hardly an improvement in comprehension. Islam must undergo a reformation, declare the Sunday pundits, and until that day will remain unenlightened and unprogressive, trapped in a Dark Ages of its own making.

This view is as simplistic and as one-dimensional as it sounds and gives no hint, for example, that the Islamic world was once the repository of much of the world’s scientific knowledge at a time when Europe was busy learning how to build stone structures again. To remind us of this important fact, and of the long and winding story that attends it, is the aim of John Freely, a historian of science at Istanbul’s Bosphorus University.

Freely’s tale begins with the ancient Greeks, the standard jumping-off point for large-scale histories. Having colonized Ionia – an area that included the central western shore of Asia Minor and its nearby islands – the Greeks began to interact with several of the advanced civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean basin. Importing mathematics and astronomy from their new neighbors, they improved upon these disciplines while extending their speculations to the broader natural sciences and to the nature of the universe itself. Science advanced, but it also began to move.

Over time the gravitational center of intellectual activity shifted west to Athens, and to Greek colonies in Italy and Sicily. With the decline of classical Greece, the center shifted again to the thriving Egyptian metropolis of Alexandria and its new library. From there it seeded the rising republic of Rome and, after city became empire and then divided itself into eastern and western halves, Greek science found in Constantinople a refuge from the approaching storms. With the rise of Islam in the second half of the first millennium came the translation of much of the classical world’s science and philosophy into the languages of the greater Middle East, a project sponsored with particular enthusiasm by the Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad.

During the Middle Ages, Europe benefited from its own preservation of Latin texts in monasteries, but the mind of Greece itself had to trickle back into the continent through translations from Arabic texts obtained from Moorish Spain. Eventually the transmission path became more direct, as increasing numbers of classical Greek works were imported from Byzantium and translated into Latin. From 1500 onward a rejuvenated European science surged ahead, but Islamic science declined, undermined by the skepticism of rulers who were increasingly under the influence of powerful religious leaders.

This is indeed a tale worth telling, and Aladdin’s Lamp does so mainly by providing capsule profiles of scientists and philosophers, explaining some of the more interesting scientific discoveries, and making note of important works. It is an efficient and systematic approach as far as it goes, but it leaves a lot to be desired. Freely offers no explanation of precisely how science came to be transmitted across each civilizational and cultural boundary, no analysis of how it was received or transformed after it arrived, and no reflections on just what it is we mean by the term “science” in the first place. The book is full of who, what and where, but entirely empty of how and why.

This is a missed opportunity, and a serious one. The issues that are raised by Freely’s subject matter are difficult, but as such are very much worth tackling. Consider the most obvious of questions. If Herodotus himself acknowledged the superiority of Egyptian astronomical observations, is ancient Greece really the correct starting point for a narrative of scientific progress? If Pythagoras advanced geometry but also founded a religious cult based on numerology and mysticism, can we really justify our self-congratulatory categorization of the Greeks as rational and the Persians as religious? If modern science is composed of activities like observation, speculation and experiment, which of these did the West contribute, and which the East? What was the relationship between science and magic in medieval and early modern Europe, and how did this compare with the same relationship in medieval Islam? And what effect on accuracy and understanding did serial translations (for example, from Greek to Syriac to Arabic to Latin to English) have on scientific works?

Freely can offer no answers to these questions because he simply doesn’t ask them. Well intended and full of factual learning, Aladdin’s Lamp promises sweeping vistas but delivers no more than a “one damn thing after another” carriage ride down a narrow valley, with individual sights pointed out as they flash by the windows. Disoriented and exhausted – not to mention disappointed – the reader is relieved to get out at the end of the journey.

More fiddling about with themes, and as an unexpected result (since WordPress erases any custom banner images when changing theme), a new banner. This one is a detail from David Burdeny’s “Five Icebergs, Weddell Sea, Antarctica” (2007). The Canadian photographer’s ability to capture the sublime character of sea and ice is redolent of the great nineteenth-century landscape artists. Browse his site and you’ll see what I mean.

I’m fascinated with the quality of light and the spatial immensity the ocean possesses. I have an enormous reverence for feeling so small in the presence of something so vast, where perspective, scale, time and distance momentarily become intangible. My photographs contemplate that condition, and through their reductive nature, suggest a formalized landscape we rarely see. The glory lies not in the act of this removal or reduction, but in the experience of what is left – sublime experience located in ordinary space: a slowly moving sky, the sun moving across a boulders surface or sea foam swirling around a pylon.

- David Burdeny

The "iron-eating" sycamore of Brig o' Turk

Plants, it is well known, have a remarkable ability — born, perhaps, of their immense patience and gradualism — to physically merge themselves with elements in their environment. Ivy will bind fast to brick, beans will curl around poles, and trees… well, consider the iron-eating sycamore of Brig o’ Turk, a village in central Scotland near Loch Lomond. The tree, well over a century old, stands next to a disused smithy and over long years has subsumed numerous metal items that had been discarded against its trunk or hung on its boughs: items including a bridle, a ship’s anchor and chain, and a bicycle, the handlebars of which are the only part still visible.

Not only is this ability a tribute to the adaptability of plants, but it also provides a particularly moving example of nature’s role as a keeper of time. In the same inevitable way that grass pushes through the cracks of unmaintained asphalt, or a lover’s heart carved into an oak will deepen and slowly scar over, the sycamore in Brig o’ Turk reminds us of the transience of our material possessions, and, of course, ourselves.

All of which provides me with a credible excuse to introduce some beautiful verses on that very theme, written by 25-year-old poet-to-watch Robert Selby (who, as you’ll see from some of the poems on his site, particularly “The Leaving of the Institutions”, has a fine sense of man’s relationship to nature — or should I say, of nature’s relationship to man).

The Sycamore

********************
Up the narrow road beside the tea-room
and you pass an iron-eating tree… (Gazetteer for Scotland)

********************

The black-faced smithy’s boy of Brig o’ Turk
propped his bicycle against the sycamore
before his final shift at the clanging hearth,
soon to head off for war to escape the bore
of pouring coal into the firepot’s girth.
Proud of his young apprentice, the old mentor
drove the new recruit homeward on his dray,
so the bicycle remained in the keep of the tree.

As the smithy’s boy made corporal and set sail,
the sycamore began a cruelly slow advance.
As bugles called from shires their lonely scale,
the bicycle was raised on a timber lance.
When the smithy’s boy died at Passchendaele
and the village darkened in remembrance,
the sycamore drew about the bicycle,
clutching to its bark the spokes and saddle.

Long since the blacksmith sold off the yard,
since war ended, resprouted, withered again,
and the Trossachs became a National Park,
the bicycle protrudes still, a man-made limb
mimicking new growth, the ribbed handlebars
waiting for the smithy’s boy to reclasp them,
to pull free the frame and tour off, roadworthy,
the cast-iron memorial in the skyward lee.

- Robert Selby (Times Literary Supplement, April 18, 2008)

Regular visitors to Archipelagoes may be surprised to find it with a whole new look. I figured that after a year and a half the place needed a bit of a repainting, and this WordPress theme offers some features that I thought you’d appreciate: the body text is darker and thus easier to read in contrast with the white background, long quotations are more vividly presented, and links are easier to spot. However, I’ve got to live with this thing a little while before I’ll be sure I want to keep it, so don’t be surprised if it changes again in the next week or two.

In case you’re wondering, the banner image above is a detail from the German Expressionist Franz Marc’s Tierschicksale (or “Animal Destinies”), painted in 1913. Having received a postcard reproduction of his painting in 1915, the artist wrote to his wife: “It is like a premonition of this war, horrible and gripping; I can hardly believe I painted it!”. Franz Marc was killed on the front in March 1916, struck in the head by a shell splinter.

One hundred and forty characters is not a lot of text. It’s maybe twenty words if you write like George Orwell, maybe fifteen if like Mervyn Peake, and a good thirty or forty if you know text message shorthand. Even if you do, it’s not exactly War and Peace.

As Jeet amusingly hinted, is Twitter yet another signpost in the ongoing decline of the modern attention span?

If so, it has been a long decline indeed. One could well make the case that since the end of the nineteenth century (to pick a reasonable but not at all definitive starting point), we’ve subjected ourselves to a series of ongoing experiments in ever-cheaper and ever-less-time-consuming communication formats and technologies. Two-hour symphonies have become three-and-a-half minute rock songs. Three-hour (or fifteen-hour, if Wagner is your taste) operas have become half-hour sitcoms, and then ten-minute YouTube videos. The 3000-word long-form newspaper article has become the 300-word blog posting, which in turn has become the 30-word Twitter entry, or “tweet”.

Yet all of this is misleading in one important sense. The opera did not “become” the sitcom, no more than did the newspaper “become” the tweet. The opera is still here. So is the newspaper. Sitcoms, rock songs, blogs, emails — all of these new formats (in some cases, new art forms) have been in addition to the originals. Our communication and entertainment formats have been multiplying and diversifying, not getting shorter.

In offering a wider range of possible durations, these formats provide us with the choice of filling the unplanned moments in our lives with (to name the most common options) either music or messages. From the days of the pocket transistor radio with earpiece, commuters have been able to listen to pop music while riding the bus on the way to work, a length of time too short for symphonies but just right for several songs in a row, each tune three or four minutes in length. The Blackberry provides a similar benefit in regards to messaging. While waiting for an elevator in a tall office building — a zone of dead time which can often span two or three minutes — a user can skim a few email messages and even briefly respond to one of them. It’s a vast improvement on staring at the Down button.

I would argue that far from our attention spans getting shorter, they’re instead getting more granular. Whereas in the past we had a relatively limited set of communication or entertainment options, and an equally limited range of format durations — a situation that a person coped with by carrying a magazine or newspaper around, or by making up word games to pass the time with a young child while waiting for the bus to come — we now have a format to match almost any span of available time. And quite naturally our attention span shortens and expands along with the choices we make each time.

The evidence for a permanent shortening may in fact be merely a trick of measurement (if indeed someone is out there actually measuring this stuff). If you look only at the time required to read any given text from start to finish, then of course as shorter texts proliferate, average attention spans will steadily decline. But does this mean that the man on the street will break off from reading his novel after only fifteen seconds, because this has become his “norm” in a lifestyle filled with tweets and emails? Of course not. He’ll read for two straight hours if he’s got the time. No one walks out of a movie after a couple of minutes, either.

But (one might retort) are newspapers not flirting with bankruptcy across North America — surely, in part, because no one has the patience anymore to plod their way through one every morning? Yes and no. There are indeed many things the matter with the newspaper industry, but I’m not convinced that a long-term decline in the patience of its readers is one of them.

I’m a contributor to this industry’s problems, so my case is worth considering. An educated business professional, I no longer read the newspaper as a physical artifact. Instead, at work, I race through the business headlines online (a much faster process than flipping pages), leaving most stories unread, glancing at the first couple of paragraphs in a few, and comprehensively reading perhaps only one or two pieces. But then I move on to other papers: the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Financial Times, BusinessWeek. And then to blogs written by experts in finance or economics: Paul Kedrosky’s Infectious Greed, Yves Smith’s naked capitalism, and so on. I try to get through all this material within 30 to 45 minutes each day, and the process itself is fully engaging of my attention. It’s a form of aggressive, inquisitive reading — with articles rapidly assessed for importance and relevance (or simply interest) and read in full, partially, or not at all, as appropriate — and I believe that it leaves me informed by a wider range of opinion and exposed to a greater number of ideas, usually more sophisticated ones, than faithfully reading that morning’s Globe and Mail would do.

Still, my focus is not made of iron; distractions happen. Email comes in while I’m researching a white paper at work, and I automatically turn to see what it is and who has sent it. In doing so, I’m probably adding more data to the short attention span thesis. Yet it’s not that the email itself is intrinsically important; more that it offers a tired mind an escape from its labours for a minute or two. Such escapes, moreover, did not suddenly appear with the arrival of email at my apartment back in 1994; I remember sitting in the library stacks at Queen’s University the year before, with no access to email, cell phone, PDA, or Twitter, and becoming repeatedly distracted from my main purpose by the multiplicity of books surrounding me. Every time I lifted my eyes from my research for a break, I’d spot an unknown but interesting-looking title on a nearby shelf. I’d reach out instinctively, then hesitate. “Just for a minute or so. Just a glance,” I’d promise myself, all guilt evaporating, my willpower surrendering without a shot fired.

As you might have guessed, it was quite common for those one or two minute breaks to drift easily into spans fifteen or twenty times longer if the book from the shelf proved compelling. My marks suffered, but I like to think my mind didn’t.

I’m not rushing to sign up for Twitter: I’ve got quite enough on my plate with two voicemail boxes, three email accounts, plus LinkedIn, Facebook, and my blog(s). I’m old-fashioned enough to carry magazines and books around with me, in case I find myself waiting a while for a commuter train. I don’t own an iPod, and don’t plan to. But neither do I worry about Twitter, or about the decline of the modern mind. When it comes to the hard work of thinking, we’ve always been a lazy and distractable bunch. One hundred and forty character messages, I figure, aren’t going to make those human failings any worse.

There come moments in the lives of writers when the words that they use everyday seem suddenly and wholly inadequate to the tasks to which they have been set. Moments when every turn of phrase, every carefully-planned construction, fails to capture and convey the desired meaning, leaving the writer with a gnawing fear that perhaps his or her mother tongue was not built to communicate important things at all, but merely to serve as a low-cost mechanism for establishing and cementing interpersonal bonds. One never loses the ability to talk about the weather, somehow.

Why is this so hard, the frustrated writer usually asks at this point, wholly rhetorically. If he or she is a good writer, the question comes with greater vehemence – the contrast between habitual eloquence and newfound inarticulacy is particularly galling for a craftsman. Yet though an answer may quickly be found among easy-to-hand external variables like the amount of sleep one has had, or the amount of coffee one has drunk so far that day, or the number of times one has been interrupted by an inquisitive child, the truth lies at a much more fundamental level.

The truth is that the written word is a terrible instrument for conveying meaning.

Here’s an example. You’re writing a newspaper article on the environmental improvements a global oil company has made to its operations. You decide to introduce the piece with a helpful bit of context, and so you type “Cormorant Oil, the major with the best environmental record, has improved its operations yet again.” You pause, and reflect on the fact that all of the global oil companies, including Cormorant, are significant polluters. Calling Cormorant “the best” seems to let the company entirely off the hook.

You try again. “Cormorant Oil, the oil major with the least bad environmental record…” Clunk. “Least bad”? That sounds awful.

Take three. “Cormorant Oil, known as the least environmentally destructive of the majors…” There. That seems to capture what you meant. But your self-satisfied smile vanishes as quickly as it came. What does “least” imply? There’s really no way to tell what a reader might think. Someone without much background knowledge in this area could well assume that Cormorant Oil is actually not very environmentally destructive at all.

You try pulling out all the stops. “Cormorant Oil’s operations are highly polluting, but are known to be the least environmentally destructive of the majors.” Surely you’ve expressed the truth now. You’re finally happy (though as a realist you’re also aware that your editor will not let that sentence into the printed paper tomorrow).

Only… Only that “but” seems like it’s forgiving Cormorant’s “highly polluting” nature. Like a skilled corporate tour guide, it moves the reader on from that little bit of messiness referred to in the first half of the sentence, towards the ever more positive stream of information about improvements and intentions and bright green visions in the rest of the article.

You sigh, return to your first version, and press on. Deadlines won’t wait.

Let’s try a different example. More general; more basic. Imagine that you’re setting out to describe a field to me. The field, as you know (since you’re staring at it), is full of daisies. I’d say more but that’s all you’ve told me so far. Yet since you’re staring at it, I know that you know a whole host of facts about that field. You can see its range of plant life (not just daisies, surely… what else is growing there?), its physical shape, the animals and birds it supports (though it may take a while for you to spot them all), the play of wind and sunlight on its surfaces, the presence or absence of a river or pond, the colour of its soil. It lies there in front of you, timeless, allowing you to look at any part of it as closely as you wish. It is a three-dimensional, five-senses-based extravaganza of information.

So you start writing. “It’s a field. It’s full of daisies.” Okay: I’m now picturing a field with one-hundred-percent daisy content, stretching out at eye-level to the horizon. Is that what you meant? No? Keep typing, then. “It’s hemmed in by trees…” (Do you mean pine trees? That’s what I’m imagining, anyway) “… and it has a path winding down the centre of it”. A path? What kind? Is it of crushed daisies? Trampled dirt? Yellow brick?

You might as well stop writing here. We both agree, I hope, that you could continue on ad infinitum, addressing my questions one by one and in this manner causing my mental image to align more and more closely with the actual field you’re trying to describe. But after an hour of typing we’d probably still differ on a thousand remaining points, and we’d likely have added some confusion into the mix, with something you’d written sending my mind off in the wrong direction due to some inherent ambiguity in the words you chose.

I’d also probably have stopped reading some time before. Who on earth wants to learn about a field of daisies at that level of detail? Show me a bloody picture and let’s move on.

Indeed, when it comes to raw informational content, a picture (particularly a photograph) is worth substantially more than one thousand words. A snapshot of that field would show me almost everything you were so laboriously trying to describe with your keyboard, and would have taken far less time to create. It wouldn’t be perfect, of course – the foxes kept their heads down while you were shooting, most of the birds were too high to make out clearly, and I can’t smell or hear anything when I look at the picture – but it would be vastly more efficient and accurate than writing could ever be.

Writing can be both as vivid and as limited a spotlight swept over darked terrain. With its narrow beam it can pick out only one thing at a time, but if these things are chosen with skill, then their nature and the order in which they’re highlighted can build a compelling image in a reader’s mind. While it may be far from the whole truth of the matter, the image will be close enough to that truth to serve the purpose of the story or article.

Describe, again, that field. As you write (and, more importantly, as I read), the beam flashes out into the gloom, sweeping rapidly across grass and flowers and glancing off trees at the periphery. A field, I think to myself. The light stops sweeping, and settles on a patch of flowers. I see they’re daisies. It moves a bit to the right, and I can see a dirt path. Now it follows the path for a short while until it meets a stream. It lingers. I realize there’s been a disturbance in the mud by the water. Footprints lead away into the darkness. What has gone on here, I wonder?

There are perhaps six facts in the paragraph above, selected out of perhaps millions of possible facts relating to the field itself. These six have been enough to capture my interest, and to give me a rough idea of what is in the field: daisies, a path, a stream, mud, footprints. My mind has filled in – or has neglected to fill in – the rest, an exercise which is sure to produce facts which, if examined, would turn out to be utterly incorrect. But to the writer, that doesn’t matter. All that matters is that I’m thinking about, or at least experiencing, the facts that he or she wants me to have in my mind.

This effect of precision-within-vagueness, by the way, assumes a competent hand. Should the writer be a poor one, then the carefully aimed spotlight can become a parachute-borne flare instead, casting a garish white light over the whole field: shadows springing up everywhere, lengthening and contracting crazily, daisies dancing in a sickening back and forth motion.

But as skilled a writer as one may be, the essence of writing is the selective illumination of certain things, and the intentional or unintentional casting into shadow of myriad others. By its nature, writing is only one word placed in front of another, each phrase generating an image that may last for a while but which will fade in memory, replaced in the conscious mind by new phrases and new images.

That anxious feeling in the pit of your stomach? It’s not the coffee. It’s your art.