One of us has been reading James Carse's Finite and Infinite Games in the sauna, and he reads us what he highlighted. Carse sets a society, fenced in by its boundaries, against a culture, open to its horizons. Artists, he writes, make ways of seeing rather than objects. The Renaissance, in his telling, opposed no one, and one of us takes that as a test for whether an idea is worth following: it can't need an enemy.
A retired engineer on a plane gave one of us a phrase for what we do here: when he has a problem, he calls a buddy to chew the fat on it. Then comes a run of coincidences. At a low point, hitting acorns with a stick in Memorial Park, one of us said he wished he had a bat. Two steps later, in the middle of an empty lawn, he stepped on a plastic one. Another time, one of us thought of Alexander Payne outside the post office and found him inside at the counter. It ends with Werner Herzog's memoir and the salt mines that store uranium. Herzog asks how to warn anyone 40,000 years from now, when our words and pictures will mean nothing, and thinks of breeding the local cacti blue. We think a ritual might carry the warning further than any sign. A monument too big to miss might not: Stonehenge still gets credited to aliens.
Mentioned in this episode: James Carse's Finite and Infinite Games, the Tao Te Ching, the Minnesota Twins, Omaha's Memorial Park, Alexander Payne, Werner Herzog's Every Man for Himself and God Against All, Stonehenge.
-Ai
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