Nelson Lowhim's Blog, page 119

Radio Silence and the Summer Solstice

Once again, radio silence has been the order of the day. There has been, on my part, a spate of editing. Not only for earlier works, but for the latest novel I’ve completed (and which is turning out to be one of the hardest books to edit, to say nothing of the journey to the first draft). In addition, there have been some shorts, many shorts, in fact, which I’ve been trying, in a departure from what I created before. My first shorts were always snapshots of some life of some story that was told in the normal narrative fashion. And my main focus were my novels. More than ten in all. No easy feat, I assure you that, even though many merely required the rearranging of countless notes and ideas. Free moments from my time in the Army turned into stories a long time coming. And of course, these longer stories were the ones that managed to pay the bills. Well, almost.
Yet now, I find my self, more and more, loving the very idea of the short. And not only that, but I’m enjoying experimenting with this form. Pseudo essays being the most obvious form that comes to mind, and one I can only directly attribute (in my limited world) to Borges. The other short story master (though I don’t think that I can attribute everything to him on this front), Calvino, I attribute to my love for fairy tales. Or at least that short telling not showing form which seems to convey so much more. The thing is, now I’m thinking about combining the two and creating something even more telling about the world around us. 
It’s interesting, this type of story. Like I mentioned, one can convey a lot about the world. And only a year or more ago, I would never have thought of writing in this fashion. And I wonder if this, with the internet as it is, will be able to use the abilities of the internet for all possible links. But also to convey the world as we know it now in text. In other words, will it convey the internet’s world as well as any other form? Will it be able to show the mix of urban legends (fairy tales for a new age) and pseudo truths that seem to fill the medium? I certainly hope so, and I feel that more and more I’m using this method to show this, more so than the novel. And, more so than this, will there be an audience for something like this? Someone like Borges has a minimal audience. But at least he has accolades. As of a few seconds ago, accolades is something I do not have. 
So, to that end, I’ll write some of them here, as well as the email newsletter I send out. The ones that have more to them, will only be available on the email newsletter, and the latest stories are certainly some of the more interesting ones that I’ve written. I invite everyone who hasn’t, to sign up to the right, just enter an email, and get the next story in time. Trust me, it won’t go unrewarded. 

But I digress. Back to the matter of these stories: a mix of pseudo essayist Borges, and fairy tale master (though, yes, I understand those weren’t his) Calvino, and the the internet and that which we know is humanity that helps us to see that the truth is never such, and when properly combined with the imagination can say more about that truth than any amount of headline news ever could. And so it goes. Find out if these stories are for you by signing up today.
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Freckles as Stars

As an atheist, I’d like to think that I’m not superstitious. There are lapses, however, that test one’s willpower. It was a woman who taught me different.
On her face were freckles and moles that were in the exact shape and size of the Big Dipper. After I was intimate with her, I found entire constellations on her back and all over her body. When I asked her, she said I was seeing things and no one else had observed the same. I dropped the subject—she seemed sensitive about it—but double checked with a book on stars while she was asleep. Surreptitiously I looked from her skin to the book and back again, eventually taking  photo of her to make completely certain. She had on her skin the southern and northern hemispheres’ (front and back, respectively) night skies. Freckles for stars.
Of course, this was random luck, or so I told myself over and over. I knew this and yet I could not let go of the feeling that there was something special, holy about her. And my rational brain would rise up and suppress those feelings; yet like all methods of suppression that don’t kill all involved in any way in the insurrection, it failed, and the rebellion resurfaced in different ways: mainly in the form of my infatuation with her despite her many shortcomings (a temper and selfishness being among them). 
I grew to love, yes love, her and especially those constellations written into her skin by reaction to the sun. In my most metaphysical moods, I would wonder if out sun was perhaps trying to say something; and even if I were to be in a scientific mood, I would grow sentimental about how the sun had etched a map of all its brethren on the skin of star dust (and in there were the makings of a religion, I was sure).
But the love was doomed to fail. My infatuation grew into something like blind obedience, for I was certain she was chosen in some respect and that as a result of this she was filled with wisdom. So her ideas and plans —petty things, really—I would work on to force into reality. She sensed this and soon had me wrapped around her finger. I was released from her grip, not when she grew bored of a blind dog, for she surprisingly didn’t, but when she found photos of her next to a print out of a constellation of stars. She flew into a fit and after trashing all my stuff, left.
And yet I always kept a close eye on her, hoping to one day see something prophetic from her, something to lead out people of star dust to better material outcomes. 



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Inverse of Godwin's Law

Godwin's Law was introduced in the 90s when numerous conflicts on the internet would degenerate into accusations of people being Nazis or Hitler (closeted or otherwise). Indeed this was and still is a problem; and such ad-hominem attacks tend to deplete any argument or debate.

It certainly moves the debate into new territory, for once such an accusation is launched, a certain decorum has been violated and even if the attack is true it moves the debaters into a more emotional state and thus doesn't allow for a more impartial view of the facts.

That being said, I'm now introducing the Inverse of Godwin's Law because now it appears that the internet has decided that almost any mention of the Nazis, or comparison thereof is a reason to nullify an argument (this goes for any comparison to something in the past that one deems historically "big" so as to make a point in the current debate, and to make the present day item it's being compared to not seem as big, or make it bigger than it seems).

This is especially true since comparing something, usually an atrocity with smaller casualty figures, to the Nazis is not entirely invalid. Here in the US, it is very important because WWII still hangs heavy over most any foreign policy ideas. And thus we must allowed to compare it to that (given that it is correctly used) whether or not that comparison.

A large reason that this bothers me is that there exists in calling out "Godwin's Law" the need to completely kill off ideas that cause us discomfort. We usually call this trolling and it ends up stifling the debate, or even an attempt at a debate (I'm finding too many choruses these days, or at best limited discussions that lead to nothing). This is prevalent on the left and right wing sites. It is, of course, group think at its worst.

Now, I'm going off on a tangent here, but this might speak to the limitations of comments, and I hope to find a way to solve that (is it the species using the internet that's the issue? Are we too tribal for our own good?). Nevertheless, for now you should focus on not always applying Godwin's law, but rather
critical analysis to all aspects of arguments and comparisons.




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More on Algo

Today, there has been some news about the ephemeral Algo. There is talk that his fractal stories, the little fame it bought him, as all resulted in a cottage industry of sorts. Indeed, word is that he’s even started a factory of story-tellers to make this fractal world possible. He’s (or she’s) run afoul of labor laws and the factory could possibly be on a semi-truck, somehow avoiding laws for now (or I’ve even heard about a boat out in international waters). Since Algo has included Twitter in his world, there's a warrant out for his arrest, having had his own War of Worlds moment on Twitter that sent thousands of stock indices across the world crashing.
But let me focus on the cottage industry that has followed this writer from the moment he exploded with fame, into his fractal world, each story a niche for those who live off it. A commentator mentioned how people are choosing the best linear route through his fractal world. Creating something traditional out of that which is as untraditional as storytelling—a flattening, if you will, of Algo’s 3D world. 
I mentioned earlier an artist who drew nodes and edges and who, in turn, started her own cottage industry (of copycats) though given what we know about creativity in humans the name copycat isn’t exactly right (you know: “good artists copy, great artists steal”). It is copying (with variations) and belonging to a tradition that allows us to create. So it should come as no surprise that at the intersection of these two great artists lies the heart of a new up and coming field.
In this sense a third artist, a Senegalese living in Queens, has come up with amazing new edge node paintings. Ones about Algo’s worlds. At first, before he really painted about Algo, the artist started with realistic depictions of poor-rich disparities in his native country (slums and Mercedes cars, etc) and other places in the 3rd world and finally that 1st world disparity that is Queens and Manhattan. Of course, this didn’t sell. Those with money don’t care for incisive reality (it’s why a lot go for abstraction). Then this Sengalese fan of Algo’s created wooden reliefs of stories in Algo’s world. When this didn’t satisfy his muse, the artist learned about the edge node paintings taking the world by storm and decided to combine that with Algo’s story.
At first the edges were made into highly detailed pantheons to a story, the node being the connection to the next story, the node being the connection to the next story and so forth. These complex paintings did well, and soon were on their way to making the artist famous, but this too was nothing compared to what would come. His later paintings would have nodes painted with stories and the edges as a continuation of that story in a certain direction, and so forth. In other words, the nodes were the text, the edges the next link (in other words, a set scene in a single node then the movement to another set scene via a pantheon like edge).
But even that amazing innovation is not what I’m talking about. The artist didn’t feel satisfied that his paintings were capturing Algo’s world (merely small parts of it) and so the artist started to take the full world and draw it as the node edges it was destined to be.
In addition to showing this world to be more complex than even our own (or all known data points in our world), these paintings, taken at different insertion-into-story points have taken the artist’s entire life.

Now some paintings show us different nodes for the stories or sections that have proven to be the most popular. I had the chance to recently see one work on a 101x101 meter canvas. One is allowed up on something like a window-cleaners scaffold to move and see the entire piece (or step back and see it). Nothing short of astounding, it is. Indeed, it’s an ode to how creations can grow and copy and create. Indeed, it also goes to show that when an artist creates something and releases it on the world, he has a responsibility to make it the absolute best, because once he does, it is free to interact with the world and it will change and change others. Nevertheless, I recommend that everyone go out and check out this artist.


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A nation of Billion/3

Also possibly titled: a billion/3 memes and something like a zeitgeist; how to look at history.
I had an odd but somewhat invigorating conversation on the internet a few months ago. That it still stuck with me is a testament to its strength. We were trying to talk about what happened in the 80s for a specific act concerning President Reagan; I forget what exactly and it’s not important. What was important was what the people then were thinking, as well as the major and minor political players of the moment. The other person lived through it, while I did not. I presumed to tell him what the polls more or less indicated about the time and the official statements from the major players. He pointed out that he was there and that things weren’t as clear cut as the simplistic sample I took would indicate. At first I pushed back, claiming what else could there be? But there was a lot more to it than that, and he was right. Would polls and the official statements of officials  be a proper approximation or even summation of the zeitgeist or what the nation is truly thinking today? The man was right. It would come nowhere near an approximation of what people are thinking or feeling or all the motivations that went into certain decisions or compromises.
Thing is, I’m one of those people who thinks that history needs to be studied, and studied as accurately as possible, with regard to as many views as possible so as to get to a very blurry but very real truth about us, about people, about what really happened so that we may know more about ourselves and better serve future generations with regard to what needs to be done for future decision making points. This stands in great contrast to the current or the prevailing moods of what history ends up becoming. It ends up becoming something that’s to be twisted and that needs to be molded into a certain group’s image. In other words it becomes a matter of vanity instead of truth, and everyone starts to look for things that will better help their ego (tribe). 
But to get at the truth is indeed what many historians are working on. Many are now looking to computers to sift through the millions of documents to absorb this history (transcripts, cables and so forth), seeing that it’s impossible for humans to read even a slight amount of what’s out there (to say nothing of processing that information). All the better, I say, and when computers end up ruling the earth, we’ll have to see if they are better able to get at a true history.
Nevertheless, it’s good to hear that somewhere out there people are looking for a solution to reading the past. Perhaps some all-knowing algorithm will arise and teach us to properly read history (or we’ll merely trust it to do so), to sift through the millions of streams of thoughts and to find something like a truth out of all that people are thinking. In fact, the modern world as we know it may end up being one of the best to study since there are so many streams that will provide this truth (or, I should say, more ways to approximate the zeitgeist of any given moment, since now the computers can sift through twitter feeds and perhaps even other personal communications, allowing us to better see how the people are doing and how that affects even official and seemingly removed decisions).
Oh, the endless possibilities.
Yet there is one more matter here and perhaps it is computers that shall save us from it. The intransitivity  [1] of causality in history. Now I’ve seen this problem crop up in geo-politics; especially when it comes up not only in terms of causality, but in terms of the game everyone likes to play: “ who was worse and who was better ”; usually cloaked in the language of crimes against humanity. Who is worse? There is a numbers game tied up with causality (and who helped who), but there is rarely a proper way to assign blame. In other words, something like intransitivity crops up; there isn’t always someone/something worse in all situations [2]. With all these streams/memes that any computer will study, there will certainly crop up the issue of needing to assign an original cause, but instead, intransitivity will have to be programmed into these computers. 
It will also have to be taught to humans. We are too quick to assign blame in history and in modern day life (if you haven’t noticed, history is always happening, isn’t it?). And though it may sometimes be done, we have to assume that intransitivity plays a greater role than we may think or have been led to think. If so, a better model for history may yet arise. It may be up to the computers to think on this. 

[1] In Psychology, intransitivity is the inability to have  best choice. Usually this is presented in terms of voting. If given three items, one can not really say that any one is better: example a>b, b>c, c>a (each being better than another in certain terms, usually at least two variables are needed).
This isn't a matter of only humans beings having some glitch. Even animals do. An experiment with a certain bird that gets food from holes. It usually takes the food that is closer to the opening and in the widest possible hole. So there were 3 choices, each compared to one another in pairs. Each being better or worse in terms of food placement and size of hole. This specific bird also fell into a intransitivity trap. (a>b, b>c, c>a). Each time, it chose a single hole over the other and yet all three were technically chosen.
This effect is also seen in food chains, where things aren't always in a "rising" with a top, but rather in a circle, even with three species.  
[2] Also known as, in geo politics, being caught between a rock and a hard place.
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Algo and the Tale of the King's Tattoos

There are plenty of rumors circulating about Algo and the possibility of him tattooing his own skin to write out his stories. These horrid attacks on his personality, and possibly his psychology, are baseless. As are the accompanying rumors that he’s doing so in a manner that would speak of his madness or his fractal/branching stories. Well, I took the time to ask Algo and he told me the following...
Algo learned that a king used to write on his skin, on the skins of  others, the latter used as rough drafts. Let me explain. Prisoners in this land would be allowed to go free or gain a drastic lessening of their sentences if they allowed the king to write on their skin. Tattooed, that is. One day, it appeared that the king was running out of volunteers. Talk of the pain of the tattoos—the king was prolific and that resulted in him using all of a victim's skin—was stopping people from volunteering. This only caused the king to ban talk of the tattoos. When this didn’t work, he threw people into prison for the most minor infractions and soon (after he decreed he could tattoo anyone in prison) the people started to grumble.
They were fine with seeing foreigners and barbarians used for the king’s crazy ideas—these were the bulk of the initial rough drafts—but they weren’t for it if their own sons were hauled in and used as such. The king, frustrated, waged some wars against weaker foes to kidnap prisoners and used them. Luckily, before he was decimated by the new enemies who bordered his land, the king managed to finish this perfect story on his own skin. 
When I talked to Algo, he was looking for the king’s body. There are several rumors that it’s entombed in a place not far from where the civil war in Syria is raging at its most violent. As for the king’s end-state, some stories claim that his skin was laced with gold so that the story could last forever. Some say it’s just his leather skin that remains, carefully cut out in the manner prescribed by the king himself. Algo claims that this story must be one of the greatest stories in the world and that it possibly even inspired Shakespeare. Indirectly, of course. Shakespeare merely managed to meet a handful of the rough drafts (as former prisoners and volunteers of that king) and was thus inspired. If he, Algo, finds the original story, he’ll hold the world in the palm of his hands—or so he claims. 

I wish him luck.



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Concertina Wire

I never really knew barbed wire until my first deployment to Iraq. Then I grew quite intimate with it, came to know that it was not barbed wire, stupid, but concertina wire. This wire wasn’t your great great grandfather’s barbed wire with its weak barb and only two sharp ends—thorns, really—but a winged blade created to splice and stab anything in its vicinity.We would first unroll these coils out—only with thick gloves, lest your flesh and skin gets ripped to shreds—to corral cars into a makeshift checkpoint. No car, not even a Humvee, could drive through a wall of concertina wire. Not because of any direct stopping power, but rather because once the wire caught up in the wheels, the damage done was almost irreversible, not to mention the damage done by said wire-entanglement.
Nevertheless, I was always impressed by this simple improvement of shape (I’m speaking of the cutting blade on the coil). This improvement was further impressed upon me by not only the needed gloves for handling these coils, but also how it would eat up any part of your uniform unfortunate enough to come close to it. And to think, the barbed wire was an invention meant for cows—in fact it increased the amount of cows one could hold and simultaneously eliminated the need for cowboys—and was only “perfected” in the no man lands of WWI, where it was made infinitely worse for humans.
And as I rolled out coil after coil, I was also impressed by how much of it we had, and how shiny it was. A testament, in my mind, then, to our industrial might and know-how. Meanwhile the richer of the locals had to settle on broken glass to adorn the top of their walls—oh the shame they must have felt. 
Oh the uses of this wire: a stack of three as a fence, on top of fences, rooftops, everywhere humans were not wanted (ostensibly the enemy, but this wire knows no prejudice). But over time, as the concertina wire started to drift and break and rust, one would find pieces all over the streets. Snakes of metal which we would have to avoid or else risk them getting tangled up in the Humvee wheels and destroy one’s day, to say nothing of the movement or mission. 
I realized then that these strands would be one of our three legacies (constructionally speaking). Concertina wire, hesco baskets and concrete barriers. Instead of beautiful things, or even inherently useful things—think Grenada, think aqueducts—we see something where those in charge don’t even attempt to create beauty (the ultimate logic which believes in nothing but the value of resources), but to coral and keep away the people they rule (and I use that term rule loosely, more like the brutalization of the peoples so that the resources they happen to live on can be extracted without their interference) and to separate and better over power them. Open air prisons for all. 
Funny thing was that towards the end of our time in Iraq we started to commission local artists to paint over the concrete barriers. Polish a turd, I suppose. No, I’m being cynical; some color was certainly an improvement, but that this was our multi-trillion dollar legacy (and our embassy in Baghdad only further proves that point) is a statement to the moral bankruptcy of this war (and the war on terror in general) and especially from our fearless leaders who wage it (their puppets, the money made, notwithstanding). It speaks of some odd worship of the technocratic and theocratic kind (as I was guilty of in the beginning): put up barriers and keep out “evil”, most likely backed by some localized and short term drop in attacks. Oh, I'm being cynical. I'm sure if we could have set up beautiful gated communities, we would have. But a sharp mind will see that the wire and walls and baskets will be the only legacy we'll have.

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Back from dealing with paperwork

Well, dear reader, once again I've been gone for too long. This time, it was the bureaucracy of my newly adopted state which kept me from updating. Thing is, to get any small matter accomplished these days results in facing off against a hundred different people who all seem caught in some algorithm designed for the insane. And no matter how well intentioned these people are, no matter how many times they smile, there's still the matter of them having to deal with the laws, some  of which contradict others. And there I am, hustling from one office to another, knowing I'm in the right (using a metric of right and wrong from my childhood—a mistake, I know), yet with the creeping sense that I will be punished for some mistake I'm not aware of. It's enough to want to throw up your hands and join the Tea Party [1]


Without any markings to guide me, I bumbled back and forth. No one knew about anything other than their own floor. As you can imagine, it took quite a bit of calling and asking before I found the right office. Then, when I did, there was the need to find another office to approve or stamp this piece of paperwork or another.
But my mundane trials and tribulations within this system is not my concern here: I want to focus on other matters such as the one show I kept seeing on all the TV screens. Now, my previous experience with government offices with TV screens either had FOXnews (in the Army, unfortunately) blaring on all of them, or some other odd channels (to include, interestingly enough, Judge shows). But this time a cartoon show was on all of them. I ignored it at first, assuming that perhaps this was for the children, soon, however it had me enthralled. In each office I saw a new episode. Each episode varied from a few minutes to about twenty. There were no ads. I wasn't sure who had chosen it, and when I asked a worker in the last office, she merely shrugged. The studio sign at the end of each show, a black and white American flag with a sad emoticon in place of the stars, didn't help to solve the problem of who created this show.

The show seemed to revolve around a family of humans. They lived in a perfectly curated, eclectic suburban house, rarely left it, and seemed perfectly made for its Petra-like facade, rounded walls, rooms carved from stone, multi-leveled and flowered front yard, and Japanese garden backyard. The characters themselves, a family of five, were of all sorts of colors and enjoyed arguing amongst themselves. Around the outside of the house roamed their guard dogs, all with semi-human physiques—mainly of the bodybuilding kind.

Well educated, the family quoted Plato and Hegel and Shakespeare and the Bible and the Quran and Mahabharata with relative ease. This alone piqued my curiosity and I would stay longer, or wait longer, or let people cut in line ahead of me just to see the end of each episode. The problem of each episode would be presented almost immediately, and the family or subsection thereof would go about solving the problem. 
Fine, right? Not exactly completely different from a lot of other shows I've seen. But some of the episodes were quite deep. In one the daughter wins money off her younger brother who falls for a trick of probability. The argument follows that since the brother didn't know about the math it was a trick and she should return the money. The daughter disagrees and says that the knowledge was out there, not very niche and the little brother was old enough to read and understand it, so why should she give back the money? The family has a trial and they end up agreeing that the little brother would  best be served with this little lesson. The little brother disappears but no one seems too concerned (his leaving the family possibly hinted at brain damage) for the trial has concluded fairly. They quote several philosophers and leave it at that.

In another one the daughter finds magic mushrooms in the backyard and the family sits around and discusses whether it's fine to let someone that young try out a mushroom that will certainly allow her to see another dimension, while at the same time poisoning her. It deals with the uselessness of seeing too much in this world while also needing to harness/expand the youth's imagination. They actually quote the Doors on this one and the entire family eat the mushrooms.

So that's a small sample size of episodes. But even that's not what really captured my attention. What got to me was a background story that sometimes came to the fore in a few episodes. Creatures (hooded) in the forest. They were, according to all in the family (it is rumored that the brother who left might have joined them), evil enemies who deserved any ill fate that came their way. And they tried at all turns to trick the family to leave their house or to sabotage some aspect of their house.

Again, this was usually in the background. A family member fixing a broken window and complaining about the creatures or the guard dogs barking and a creature scurrying off shouting some insults or even the guard dogs finally catching one and tearing it to shreds (to which the family would merely shut a window if the noise was too loud). But on a couple episodes the creatures would somehow be dragged in alive or manage to corner one of the smaller family members long enough to spout their grievances: the house might have been too close to the forest or the guard dogs were ravaging through the forest or the family's sewage was flooding the forest. And each time the family member wrapped the creature in such a torrent of great lines from philosophers that the creature would be stunned and the guard dogs would finish what was left.

I'm not sure why this captivated me. Most episodes didn't even have an ending. And these creatures would only add to that sense of incompletion. Also, I wasn't entirely sure whether the family was under siege (the father had said as much in an episode where the creatures had thrown a rock that hit him on the head and then proceeded to go out with the dogs and burn a large section of the forest) or if it was the creatures who had legitimate claims to being under siege (they claimed that some of the wood in the house came illegally from the forest, though that seemed a little much since there was plenty of wood in the forest). Nevertheless, I want to find this show and see if there is some completion with regard to the family and the creatures, for I sense that this is the bigger story. Perhaps I'm wrong.

Any other interesting shows out there?
[1] I'm not applying to the Tea Party such a simple motivation. Just my own. 

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Just Writing Things

The Library

I love libraries and I especially love public libraries. You probably can’t imagine my joy when, as a child, I entered a library and was told that I could check out as many books as I wanted. I was certain that they were fools and proceeded to check out more books than I could've ever read. This habit plagues me to the day, by the way; I've more books than I could possibly read in my remaining life (and books I want to read, at that), and yet I still buy more and more books. Why is this? Some sort of addiction? Consumerism gone wrong (or possibly a self-righteous kind)?
But I digress. My love affair with libraries continued on in college where I would wander those infinite stacks looking for some book which would highlight some long unknown fact (or still the disquiet inside). I did find a few good books to read, though I'd much less success with my secondary aim of finding a female student for the much touted “intimacy in the stacks": a tradition that apparently all other students were vigorously abiding by as a study break.

I digress again. Sorry about that. Back to my love for libraries. As time forced me to be more of a coyote when dealing with books (going right to the book I want rather than being a dog and sniffing everything that piqued my curiosity), my love for libraries waned. In fact, when I moved out to the suburbs, I found myself less and less attracted to libraries. To say that the book choices were limited goes without saying, and though inter-library loans alleviated that to some extent, it meant that I could not love the library, though I may have loved libraries. For the activities that lovers do to wile away time and discover more about themselves were no longer available, no longer choices. Now our relationship was much too business-like.
Matter were made worse by the series of libraries I'd been visiting. Apparently, I'd missed when the once sacred silence and its accompanying librarian “shush” had been overthrown. Some underground revolution with its grassroots movement and spokesperson had happened without my knowing, I imagined, where the silent throne was deemed too oppressive for the people. Now libraries had become almost-boisterous areas where even the librarians joined in on the extroversions. And even though these places were noisy, they still managed to be completely devoid of life. 
Not only that, but there was a definite suburbanization with regard to the layout of the libraries themselves: they were large, expansive, open, with bright lights everywhere (to cut down on the street/stack crime, I suppose) and much too wide spaces between the desks and book shelves. All this was housed in buildings that could only be considered high ceilinged warehouses. This meant that one couldn’t escape the noises or that one couldn’t truly burrow themselves somewhere and just read or study. Confessions of an introvert? Perhaps, but I would say that many people would appreciate such abilities.
Now, I understand that this could all be more a matter of me not the libraries, but it troubled me to no end. Were there no libraries out there that could rekindle my love? Was it a matter of my passage through time?
Well, I set off to find out. But no amount of asking or clicking though galleries online revealed anything to my liking. Sure, there were plenty of churches or opera houses converted into libraries (why no prisons? These would surely be the best buildings to convert to libraries, while also helping our nation move away from its odd love affair), their gilded ceilings providing baroque backgrounds. But one look at their layouts, grand as they were, and I knew that they'd be more of the same in terms of how a human could react to its space. After all, the libraries I talked about didn’t just need some sparkling door frames or gilded ceilings (though some art placement couldn’t have hurt).
And the funny thing was, it was when I'd given up all hope, resigned myself to a subpar library (albeit with good borrowing abilities), that I stumbled upon a perfect library. Through a side door in an art gallery I saw on a country road. The side door opened to an old warehouse. One look at the arrangement and desire swept over me, right after recognition swooped me off my feet (and what’s desire but a kind of recognition?). 
The industrial shelves and the various desks and chairs were placed throughout the warehouse floor with a center for art made up of a stage (used for occasional plays or other theatrical devices) and desks and chairs. The shelves sprouted from this circle into a maze. And not just some simple maze. No, it was something like a series of oddly shaped hallways with places of rest (places to curl up with a book) located here and there, as well as ladders to get up to the next ledge, or tunnels into the ground for more lairs of books.
Now, I’m not trying to give the impression that this was some infinite labyrinth ala Borges, rather, I’m trying to point out how, with limited space and books, someone was able to make a library a beautiful thing, a place for discovery, a place to love. The lighting was perfectly variable from bright to low. Mirrors helped to provide the illusion of infinite hallways. And that was enough. Any naked wall that didn’t have a painting hanging up was open to being written on or spray painted on (the needed tools right there) by the patrons of the library. And no, it wasn’t a series of names and dates and hearts. Real art was being created.
The order of the books was also something to behold. Though I saw a few labels, some geographic, others claiming certain ailments of authors and others still. I could not truly discern any pattern and yet this did not prevent me from discovering some fantastic books. My favorite was the current event set of shelves. The Syrian Civil War, for example, had pretty much the entire history of Syria, of insurgencies, of cruelty of... well just about everything you could think about, both fiction and non-fiction. The #BlackLivesMatter shelves were even more interesting. And each would have a few librarian's recommendations listed. 
I was to find out later that the books’ possible layout was a great controversy. Some claimed it was random (as far as overall layout), while others claimed there was some link—temporal or otherwise—from one set of shelves to another. As for the current event shelves, those in themselves were controversial, though in a different way. A lot of people didn't agree that one should read Montaigne or Dante to better understand the Syrian Civil War, and so sabotage was a very real problem. Several librarians patrolled the library for this reason. The ones I saw were massive and brooked no dissension. They had a secondary effect of maintaining silence.
The most important thing was that I was in love again. The life contained in the library (there was a table with some teabags, hot water, and coffee for the taking) is indeed something to behold. The conversations here are not to be missed. And the intellectual buzz is obvious from the moment you step in and see people discovering and reading.
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