Smelled

Not older than seven and accompanied by her two sisters a little girl knelt down in the sidewalk to be smelled by my dog. He is so big that her, kneeling on the ground, would not be taller than his head when he is sitting.

I was talking to Ed about winters in the southern hemisphere as I borrowed his battery charger and there they came. Three girls in blue uniforms coming from school had stopped in front of us scared of the big dog, afraid to pass by. I announced his good nature and they approached. Then they wanted to pet him as he smelled the mosquito bites on their legs. The older sister went past us annoyed at the delay and the younger one just stood there mesmerized by the dog. But her, she liked how it felt to have your bare legs smelled by a dog. A dog's nose is cold and Ike, my dog, also likes to lick a little bit some of the things he smells. So she knelt down on the sidewalk and got her face close to my dog's to let him smell behind her ears where it tickles. It must have been pleasurable. For a while she was away on the tickles and chills, eyes closed, enjoying the deep sensations: a cold wet nose that pries and pushes, that that inspects the neck with such unpredictable moves. A delight. Then, she got up, smiled good by, took her sister and left.

Frozen Flies

Father Antonio Segura on his pious wisdom froze twenty flies. On his youth he had been a magician's apprentice for a couple of years. Seeing his inability to instill the power of prayer on his pupils he had decided to use an old trick he learned back then. The next day after the morning snack twenty children who would soon make their first communion sat on their desks each looking at a dead fly. Father Antonio instructed them to pray; to ask god to restore life to the fly in front of them; but to pray hard as it would be the only way God would grant their desires.

One by one the flies started waking up as they thawed, the ones closed to the window first. Children whose flies were still dead prayed harder. Soon the room was embellished with the buzz and pirouettes of nineteen flying flies. Only one lied dead. Father Antonio had inadvertently broken some tiny vital part on the freezing process. Alicia was praying hard but was starting to falter. That God had not yet listened to her prayers despite her fervent attempts made her nervous and her nervousness was starting to distract her away from praying. Father Antonio stood there not knowing what to do.

On the fast lane with Mrs. Roe

Mrs Roe leaves every morning at 7:20 to get to her job at the greenhouse. She always looks a bit rushed, almost late. With her goes a black and silver coffee mug and a black lunch box whose carefully packed contents are unknown to me except for a banana strapped on the top. She gets into her white never washed rusty 1984 Ford pick up truck, backs out into the alley, waves goodby and darts away.

I rode with her today.

I was amazed at the amount of preparation that have gone into the trip. She had taken cigarrettes with her, and a lighter; a newspaper to read at work, a change purse to buy a soda can. She had her sunglasses on. Everything went acording to plan. She knew when to switch lanes, knew which streetlights were slow, what were the turns and where to speed.

The rest was concentration and zeal. We left 10 minutes late which ment, as she anounced, that we had to run. "It is green folks!" to the lane of morning commutters packed in front of her. Tension in the air and her, ready to swerve around, to go, to make the engine reve and the back wheels of the pick up skid on desperation to grab onto the ground. But it didn't happen, there was just the tension, the readines and the zeal.

Half an hour on the highway with this lady at seventy miles an hour with the tension and the zeal of her morning commute as she drinks her coffee smokes her cigarrettes and listens to scratchy blues on the makeshift speakers I put in for her is like a dream. The sun marks her face with shadows under her shades, the windows are open and the smoke desapears into the slower lanes. All that and the enjoyment of everything going so perfectly, of knowing that the old tires on the old rusty truck will not blow up at seventy miles an hour today in the middle of a sticky Missouri summer and that soon she will be sitting on a step ladder flipping through the paper and eating her banana.

She will be done at 4 pm sharp. In the meanwhile she'll be sweating, laughing laudly, cursing and getting bored surrounded by geraniums, bags of fertilizer, bottles of sodium sulfide, windvanes and a dog. I go back to St. Louis making 55 on the highway and thinking of writing this impression of when I drove Mrs Roe into her job and peeked into her queerky dangerous ways.

Psychology as philosophy

Intelligence is not to be understood only in terms of success. Intelligence is about the ability to try actions in a reasonable way. Thus, when there is a lack of information, the intelligent system may make a mistake even though the whole process was carried through rationally. Understanding intelligence, what it consists in, has to do with understanding how reasonable trying occurs and what features of the process make it reasonable.

For example, you conclude "somebody has a hat" from "this guy has a hat". You do so via a rational transition. How is it made? What in the process by which the inference was made makes the inference rational? In this case it seems that what makes the process intelligent is that from the fact that a guy has a hat, it follows that somebody has a hat. But to understand intelligence, the question is how this relation is transparent to the system that makes the inference.

How do we know that the postman has brought the mail when the mailbox rattles, that the lamp is broken because a cable is loose, that a blender works by suckung the heavy stuff into a moving blade? How do we get to understad these things? What are the little mental moves that we have to make in order to be said to understand such facts?

Psychology uncovers many of these processes. A flashing light on the periphery of you visual field will pull your attention to the location of the flash. As a result, you are significantly faster in detecting things at that location as long as they appear a short period of time after the flash. However, if there is a delay between the flash and the target you become slower to detect it. This is called Inhibition of Return (IOR). IOR does not seem to be a quirck but one of those rational mental moves. If you have already looked at a place, it makes sense for you to inhibit that location least you keep looking on the same place.

Psychology trades on processes like this. It thus allows us to understand intelligence. It tells us about the small mental movements that make our thinking rational.

Suicide

Two years ago, a thirteen year old girl, call her Carolina, jumped out of her bedroom window in central Bogota. She fell fifteen flors into a terrace in the second flor in the middle of the night. Her bed was dragged slightly towards the window and there was a scarf tied to one of the legs. They also found some sheets and scarfs tied up and lying on the terrace. Her best friend lived two floors below her. She had a dress on, was wearing perfume and had made up her face.

Everyone was surprised and devastated. Carolina was a normal kid, with loving intelligent parents. Apparently, she had fought with them earlier that day becase they would not let her go to a party.

My mother knew her mother at the time of the jump. They lived two buildings east from my mothers' appartment. As far as I could tell her mother was a bogotanian professional, liberal, intellectual.

Given my mothers' closeness to the incident I got to hear part of what happened. At first no one could understand the incident. Nobody could have thrown her out of the window and there was clearly not enough reason for her to suicide. Nothing extrange had happened in the days prior to the incident except for this minor fight with her parents. Things became clarer when her girlfriend finally talked.

They had a plan. Her parents didn't let her go to the party but Carolina was going to scape in the middle of the night. She had made a rope out of sheets and scarfs that she had tied to one of the legs of her bed and to her ancle. The idea was to jump out tied to her bed so as to swing into her girlfriend's window two floors below. Her friend had opened the window and was waiting for her. They were gona get a ride with her girlfriend's parents.

There are so many things with this tragic story, the absurdity, the loss... But there is one thing that strikes me the most. Carolina was captive of her fantasy. She wanted to scape out of the window with a makeshift rope. Jump out and swing gracefully into her friend's bedroom two floors below. The plan was lied down. Did she think of herself as a princess? a prisioner? the heroine of an anime adventure?

Whetever it was, she did not understand some of the most basic things about the world in which she lived. Knowing where they lived and who her mother was, I imagine her the owner of a hundred coloring books, avid reader of children's poetry, familiar to theater and dance. Quick with words, smart. She probably had an aunt who visited her and thaught her many crafts as they gosiped and giggled. She was thaught to appreciate art and life and the nature arround her. She was independent, and so she scaped.

And yet, so much was amiss. That is what strikes me the most.

Pota Mara

'Pota mara' is a big white marble. When I was a kid we used to call them that way. I have no idea if the name persisted and I don't know where it came from. We all liked them and traded them for at least three or four regular marbles. You could win a lot of marbles if you offered your Pota Mara as a target. Kids would try to hit it at least five times leaving you with that many marbles. A Pota Mara was a well of riches.