on structure

As I grow older, I realize more and more the importance of structure, and how irrelevant it appears to the casual observer. In large part, I think structure is taken for granted. We awake, the paper is there, on our doorstep. We expect the mails. We expect trains to run on time (even if this is a vain hope in Boston). But to simply look at the memnotechnical structure of our days and to believe this an adequate expression of societal order is a mistake. Trains aren't just plunked there, purchased at the local train store by hobbyists. They require rail lines, traffic signals, planing of traffic patterns, material cost outlays for personel and maintenance. They must conform to a gauge, and divers specifications established by various committees facing varying degrees of public oversight. A train, at a station, in some proximity to your house at a (reasonably) proscribed time is, in fact, quite a marvel.

Or take airflight. I was reading, on a whim (thanks to the tender ministrations of the Central Square Salvation Army which had all paperbacks for just 79 cents) the fine, if grotesquely prurient, adventure yarn Alive (also a major motion picture. I'm sure everyone's heard about Alive, since everyone loves canibalism, and everyone loves the particular voyeurism of survival stories (just ask Jon Krakauer who perfectly rode the line between observation and schadenfreude into a brilliant book). Alive is particularly bad in this aspect, as Piers Paul Read painstakingly gives the reader a culinary tour of the thousand ways to canibalize a man (slice up the tendons with a razor blade, let 'em cure in the Andean sun, eat raw like so much beef jerky; braise lightly with a camp stove, eat rare like a good steak; smash skull and evacuate brains with the ostensible goal of harvesting glucose, lightly season with pepper; consume semi-rotten entrails, taking care to avoid stray digestive juices; consume lungs for no particular reason beyond brute extigency; avoid genitals at first, but later eat scrotum; eat liver, early and often, for the minerals and vitamins) and the thousand and one ways to justify such behavior (brute extingency, variously etiolated scholastic arguments about the canibalistic nature of the Eucharist (later officially disavowed), half-mad statements about one-ness and elements of homosocial sacrifice, poorly digested stews of catholic theology filtered through the athletic brain of a playboy rugy team, authentic hunger) all the while insisting on his particular species of journalistic integrity (his own catholicism, his will-to-truth over the material, his bravery in fully recognizing the extingency of survival, the clearing of the air around a (horrid) event, prurient interest and thinly veiled delight in such offbeat gustatory pleasures). The book is an unpleasant masterpiece, a anti-Julia Child, a gastronomical voyage into (fortunately) rarely-charted waters. But, more importantly, the book is also a exegesis on the (banal) failures of poor, barely motivated, third world countries to have effective air command and control situtations, for their pilots to be poorly trained and to lack effective technology, and for stupid navigational mistakes (coupled with idiotic search and rescue strategies). Alive might be a menu masquerading as reportage, but it also unveils the importance of structure.

We should be glad, after all, that we live in America, where nobody eats eachother, not least because of the toxic levels of cholesterol in your average Joe.