An essay by Louise Steinman and the final part of Rob Bowman's "On Being and On Being the Right Size"
Dear Readers,
Welcome to April, known around these parts as “the cruellest month.” But while I like Lilacs out of the dead land and Dull roots as much as the next guy, I try to focus on the positives.
Like a brand-new essay by Louise Steinman and the conclusion of Rob Bowman’s epic diary essay.
Sure, winter may have kept us warm with its forgetful snow, but Air/Light is gonna keep you HOT!
✌️
The Editors
Louise Steinman: “That LA Bug”
I never wanted to be born in Los Angeles. My childhood, I suspected, was misplaced. My mother and father were both New Yorkers. Thanks to a trove of correspondence that I discovered after my parents passed away within months of each other, I can pinpoint the exact date—August 1, 1941—that determined my destiny as a native Angeleno. On that morning, my young father stepped off the passenger train at L.A.’s Union Station. In the letter to my mother he wrote later that day: “Now I shall commence to tell you of my Gulliver’s Travels thru this fairyland of California.”
It was Norman Steinman’s first-ever westward crossing of the North American continent, where he’d arrived as a six-year-old in 1921 with his mother and sister, refugees from Ukraine during a period of profound upheaval. The entire country was a battlefield. For three years, per historian Timothy Snyder, five different armies had converged in Ukraine: Reds, Whites, Ukrainian nationalists, anarchists, and Poles. Bands of Cossacks rampaged through the countryside. All of it, of course, was bad for the Jews.
My father forgot his native Russian, but claimed he sometimes dreamed in his native tongue. He often referred to himself as a “Melancholy Slav.”
“On Being and On Being the Right Size,” Part 5 by Rob Bowman
We’re thrilled to present “On Being and On Being the Right Size” in five parts for the next five weeks. You can read all the sections of the essay here.
—The Editors
I’m not as smart as I used to be.
It sounds like a weird boast, like talking about what a great athlete someone was before their knee blew out in high school. And maybe there is some of that. But here is how I know: There are blanks in my memory. Gray things, static and fuzz. Even when I concentrate, the connections don’t come as they once did. It’s like when you reach for something on a high shelf and your fingertips can gently manipulate it until it spins and rotates toward you and you can grab or tilt it until it tumbles into your hand. Now I reach up but my fingers don’t make contact or just barely brush against it. Enough to let me know it’s there but not to hold it. To tantalize and pain me.
Thomas uses insects to consider the process of thought in “On Societies as Organisms.” He writes that an individual ant has no mind, that it is but a single spark of thought, a “ganglion on legs. Four ants together, or ten, encircling a dead moth on a path, begin to look more like an idea.” They move the dead moth toward the hill but only after “the dense mass of thousands of ants … blackening the ground” fully become a mind, “thinking, planning, calculating. It is an intelligence, a kind of live computer, with crawling bits for its wits.”
How many ants compose my mind? I worry I’m the dead moth. Or maybe my mind has become like the termites Thomas also describes. “Two or three termites in a chamber,” he explains, “will begin to pick up pellets and move them from place to place, but nothing comes of it; nothing is built. As more join in, they seem to reach a critical mass, a quorum, and the thinking begins.” I wonder about the theory here. I think what happens may have less to do with the number of termites than the number of pellets. As Thomas elaborates: “They place pellets atop pellets, then throw up columns and beautiful, curving, symmetrical arches, and the crystalline architecture of vaulted chambers is created.” The symmetry comes if we let it, or if the termites let it, in other words.