The stories this morning make the point that we listen to bitterness and taste the fury of our image reflected. "Oh, no," you say, "But that's not me—" and in self-defense we turn to symbols and history, those shambling lawyers from the past who remember where the animals were buried.

More concretely, it's been a rather tumultous couple of weeks, hasn't it. We've moved from action to reflection, and are now struggling to order ourselves in a changed landscape. You might find all the meaning you need in a lousy T-shirt, or you could take refuge in strong-bad art. Whichever choice you make, hope like hell that the looters left you something.

Put Out the Light

Before we look at how art is helping and hurting, let's note that the invisible line that separates the First World from the Third World has drawn a bit closer to home. It's the demarcation that says, "past this point, the value of a human life just got a whole lot cheaper": Man killed over cigarette. In this case, club bouncer Dana (Shazam) Blake, 32, of Queens, was brutally stabbed to death (as opposed to when it happens the nice way) in a nightclub when he tried to eject a pair of "chinatown brothers," one of whom was puffing away in violation of Bloomberg's new anti-smoking ordinance.

Catching a Buzz

Technically, "synesthesia" is the juxtaposition of senses. Artists do this all the time, as in "marbles of the dancing floor / break bitter furies of complexity." Nokia's doing it, too: It's a cell-phone. No, it's a sex toy!

Actually, it's both. First, you download the Purring Kitty software to your phone via WAP link from vibelet.com. See their Webpage for compatibility information, but generally you'll need a Java-enabled Nokia phone with the vibrating battery pack. Then, you have manual control for as long as your battery holds out.

Kitty is the ultimate companion, and can be downloaded straight to a phone! Its tender purring vibrations provide perfect company on even the loneliest winter nights!

Signs of Freedom

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has been taking a lot of heat over his ill-thought crack that "Freedom is sometimes untidy." Yes, Alec, a very great unpleasantness, indeed. From the London Times:

Britain and America stood aside last night as murder and looting plunged Baghdad and other main cities into new levels of anarchy.

Which brings us back to the sacking of Iraq's National Museum of Antiquities in Baghdad. Looks like we've lost some irreplacable treasures.

It's not as if we weren't warned, by the way.

In the months leading up to the Iraq war, U.S. scholars repeatedly urged the Defense Department to protect Iraq's priceless archaeological heritage from looters, and warned specifically that the National Museum of Antiquities was the single most important site in the country.

Of especial importance is this image, most likely of the Mesopotamian goddess Inanna. Also known as The White Lady, her job was to turn over alphabetic characters in the linguistic Wheel of Fortune. Actually, that's fairly much the case. At 5,500 years old, this is one of the earliest known examples of representational sculpture. Scholars believe this mask or icon was, unlike earlier examples, actually sculpted with "enough individuality to suggest a real person as the original source," and entirely hand-made instead of being built-up around a skull.

We see here that man at this stage is starting to grasp the idea of symbology, an essential concept fundamental to the idea of writing. This isn't just a piece of art, it's archeological evidence from a time when our species was just beginning to grapple with the ramifications of abstract thought.

Another priceless loss is the Vase of Uruk, which is "important as an early example of narrative art using pictures." This is directly associated with the invention of writing, as the bands of pictures that you can see in the detail tell a story, and these were meant to be "read" from the bottom upward.

Possibly of even greater importance is the fact that the Vase of Uruk is "the earliest known depiction of a ritual." This was, literally, our oldest surviving example of religious art. I certainly hope that whoever has this isn't using it as an ashtray or an umbrella stand.

McGuire Gibson, an Iraq specialist at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, said yesterday that he went back [to the Pentagon] twice more, and he and colleagues peppered Defense Department officials with e-mail reminders in the weeks before the war began.

Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, for his part, shrugged all of that off Sunday on "Meet the Press," saying that "We didn't allow it. It happened...We don't allow bad things to happen. Bad things happen in life, and people do loot." Yes, well, this was a very bad thing.

Here's W.B. Yeats, the bard of ben Bulgen, with some thoughts on the subject:

Civilisation is hooped together, brought
Under a rule, under the semblance of peace
By manifold illusion; but man's life is thought,
And he, despite his terror, cannot cease
Ravening through century after century
Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come
Into the desolation of reality...

10:24:20 AM