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across the air shaft
Tuesday, July 9 2002
"How can that possibly provide a survival advantage?" I ask myself amid the piercing screams of the two neighbor children next door across the air shaft. They keep it up for hours on end, each of them seemingly trying to outdo the other in an escalating display of existential despair. The miseries of the Black Plague and the Killing Fields of Cambodia were nothing compared to the infantile anguish from which they now seemed to suffer. Their screams alone were reason enough to step up my job search another notch. This afternoon I sent out several resumes, including one via 37 cent snail mail (no email address was provided - it's going to be fun working as a web developer for that company).
But imagine if my job actually consisted of hanging around shrieking infants day in and day out? As with most Park Slope children, you see, the neighbor kids are both entrusted to a Jamaican nanny every workday. Being in Park Slope at all times of the day, I've noticed that during working hours, most of the white children one sees are being pushed up and down 7th Avenue by black women. I've found myself mentally comparing and contrasting this surrogate parenting with the nest parasitism undertaken by cowbirds and cuckoos. And I've decided that the arrangement is far from parasitic and it might actually be better for the Jamaicans and their culture than for the whites employing them (and "white culture"). For one thing, the Jamaican nannies all receive paychecks in recompense for the usurpation of their parenting skills. But the most-overlooked advantage they have over their bird analogues is a purely human one, a result of the vast environmental flexibility of the human mind. Just as a Korean child raised in a Jewish family will grow up fully Jewish, so a child raised (in part) by a Jamaican nanny ends up being (in part) culturally Jamaican. For Jamaicans, this can be nothing but a good thing. Since the Jamaican nannies of Park Slope are raising America's next generation of elite whites, chances are good that these whites will always harbor a certain affinity for things Jamaican. A very real example of this sort of thing can be found in Iceland, where pagan Vikings enslaved Irish Catholics and forced them to raise their children. Within a few generations, Iceland had become entirely (and bloodlessly) Christianized.
For many people, their life's purpose is the reproduction of their particular unremarkable combination of genetic information. Some of them are extremists, couching their life's passion in religious terms; they have no interest in art or music unless it makes treacly statements in support of their cause. To me it's transparently selfish and really not very impressive; dogs, cats, and Norway Rats do the same thing while somehow avoiding the nauseating path of the sanctimonious.
But if the term "babies" can be extended a little to mean any creation (as many people informally do), then my support for the making of babies is fully restored. After all, with this broadened definition, paintings and music become babies too. One of the most awesome things about music, and the production of it, is that it allows sexually-improbable combinations of people to make babies, babies that can live forever and have children of their own without ever once fouling a diaper or ruining my bath from across the air shaft. Okay, I take that back, there's plenty of music out there with the potential to ruin my bath from across the air shaft.
Noah with that painting I've been working on lately. I made some big changes to it today.
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Noah has been paying lots of attention to a nesting pigeon outside the window lately.
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