Bring a lamp.

Category: Blog

She hides behind the corner of her smile

In his song Ella se esconde (“She hides herself”) the Panamanian musician and politician Rubén Blades writes about a mysterious woman who has “tangled him in her mess, and has stolen his heart”.

Me has enredao en tu revulu
y me has robado el corazón!

A recurring line in his song about that woman — mystifying him yet carrying his ring around her finger — describes how she hides herself. She is his, yet hidden. She is close to his heart, yet unreachable.

Ella se esconde atras la esquina de su sonrisa.

She hides behind the corner of her smile. When you read this, an image may very well come to mind. Perhaps of a young woman, smiling yet turned away. Perhaps of just the corner of a smile, hiding everything else behind it.

A black and white cropped photo of a young freckled woman with long hair, showing the left side of her face from the nose down to the chin. A wide smile with strands of hair flowing to its side breaks the image in two.

In Film Theory: The Basics, film director Kevin McDonald quotes Jean Epstein‘s lyrical description of a smile as recorded in Richard Abel’s French Film Theory and Criticism,

Muscular preambles ripple beneath the skin. Shadows shift, tremble, hesitate. Something is being decided. A breeze of emotion underlines the mouth with clouds. The orography of the face vacillates. Seismic shocks begin. Capillary wrinkles try to split the fault. A wave carries them away. Crescendo. A muscle bridles. The lip is laced with tics like a theater curtain. Everything is movement, imbalance, crisis. Crack. The mouth gives way, like a ripe fruit splitting open. As if slit by a scalpel, a keyboard-like smile cuts laterally into the corner of the lips.

Richard Abel, French Film Theory and Criticism (1988)

McDonald reflects on Epstein’s work,

Epstein’s enamored tribute to the close-up of a mouth as it begins to smile redoubles film’s formal powers. His poetic language makes the object he describes strange and unusual, nearly indecipherable, but in doing so, he also foregrounds the bewitching microscopic details of human physiognomy, transforming an otherwise mundane and entirely unremarkable action into something uncanny and enchanting.

McDonald, Kevin, Film Theory: The Basics. (2022)

McDonald considers type of reflection on the close-up — something not generally used in painting, but experimented with in film — a part of photogénie, that synthesis of the technological and the aesthetic that was such a part of the early French film culture during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Bringing out a new perspective and focus through selective focus.

A grid compilation of three images: two side to side, one below. The top-left depicts a surrealist painting of a smiling face in a street-graffiti style. To its right is a cropped section of the Mona Lisa painting, showing the iconic face and smile. Beneath this, the wide-stretching Amazon.com smile.
Surrealist, realist and consumerist smiles.

The smile, inviting — beckoning, perhaps — yet at times evading and obscuring. As Blades sings:

Yo me la quedo mirando.
No sé qué estará pensando,
con su cara de Mona Lisa.

I keep looking, although I do not know what she is thinking. With her Mona Lisa face.

Hiding behind the corner of her smile.


Give it a listen.

The pebbles on Dover Beach

Matthew Arnold wrote his famous poem “Dover Beach” likely around the late 1840s. It has strong elements of romanticism:

The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

yet this is soon followed by sadness.

Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Hope, light, and sweet night air
are carried by notes of despair

And all this in a Victorian time of faith in technological progress. The Great Exhibition in Paris would open its doors in 1851, showing the world the Things To Come: Leech-using barometers (no, really — have a look), photography, pay toilets, firearms…

Ah yes, firearms. There might have been some rumblings in Europe, but weren’t there always? It wouldn’t be until 1884 before Hiram Maxim would develop the first firearm that combined the words “machine” and “gun”.

In 1882 I was in Vienna, where I met an American whom I had known in the States. He said: “Hang your chemistry and electricity! If you want to make a pile of money, invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each others’ throats with greater facility.”

Hiram Maxim

Arnold continues:

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

Sophocles. That playwright who makes the Antigone chorus cry:

Happy are they whose time has not tasted disaster.
For a house that is shaken by gods, there the curse
fails not at all, but floods each generation in turn:
just so the swell and the surge, pushed hard by grim
blasts of storm winds from Thrace, scouring the crests
of the deep, darkling sea, stirs up the black silted sands,
beneath where the wracked and abutting cliffs resound.

Sophocles’ Antigone (excerpt) translated by Robin Bond

Moving the poem’s theme of sea and beach along on the “turbid ebb and flow of human misery”, there follows a melancholic yearning for when the Sea of Faith was as full as that distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Arnold, though an atheist, still seems to yearn for that faith that he has found wanting and ebbing. Those “naked shingles of the world” without faith remind me of the madman’s speech which Nietzsche’s would write some years later in The Gay Science:

Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing?
Do we not feel the breath of empty space?
Has it not become colder?
Is not night continually closing in on us?
Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning?

Friedrich Nietzsche, the gay science (1882, excerpt)

Feeling this breath of empty space, this retreating roar of the surf on so many pebbles, the naked shingles of the world, Arnold lunges for a stronghold:

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

The existential conclusion attempts to harness love as that which can move us from having to face the naked shingles of the world. Even though this world “hath really neither joy, not love, not light, not certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain”.


I can’t help but find the poem prophetic at times. Arnold writes full of romanticism, existential dread and despair during a time of great optimism in progress. Yet his ignorant armies clashing by night would eventually clash in that Great War. That same war that would have Wilfred Owen produce this other great poem, yet take his life all the same.

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer,
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et decorum est” (excerpt, written during WW1),

The many uses for a frog leg

In 1780, Luigi Galvani discovered that when you put electrical current through a severed frog leg, it’d twitch. This would eventually lead to the development of the Galvanometer.

A mechanical device containing two electrical connectors — one black, one red — and an analog readout dial.
A Peaktech 205-08 analog galvanometer.

Hence imagine you are doing some home improvement, and want to verify whether a wire is live. But alas, you don’t have a galvanometer handy – and while you could turn off the power mains, well, that’s too much trouble.

How about using a test light? Alas! You don’t have one and the stores are closed…

A yellow screwdriver-style test light being inserted into a power socket. The test light inside the screw driver is lit up.
A test light. Yep, that one’s live.

Instead! Head to the nearest pond, and catch yourself a frog. Or even better, catch yourself a few, because you’ll need to replace your frog’s leg galvanoscope every two days…

An ink drawing of a test tube containing a severed frog leg. The top of the frog leg has a thin metal wire sticking out of it.
A frog’s leg galvanoscope.

Getting unstuck

In the 14 years that I’ve been a volunteer firefighter, our training has always evolved. The risks of firefighting are varied and change with time. Hybrid and full-electric cars — with more than just a single or double airbag in front — are just an aspect of the larger energy transition. Solar panels, hydrogen, the increase of heat pumps — this changing landscape is something we move along with in our training.

That said, an old-fashioned structure fire can still carry plenty of surprises of its own. You may be navigating a building, and parts of it may collapse as its structural integrity is weakened by the heat. And now you’re stuck.

Recently we’ve been using a new training aid. Wooden board tunnels, with inside either rope webbing, or strung strands of electric wire. The tunnel can be simply horizontal, or positioned at an angle, allowing for either climbing or descending. The exercise is to make it from one end to the other. With the earthquake tragedies in Syria and Turkey fresh in our minds, we set to test ourselves.

Depending on your approach, you might go head-first into the horizontal tunnel. Tugging at one part of the web, tightens it somewhere else. You make some room. Now part of the web snags behind your air bottle. Moving only gets you tighter stuck. You didn’t have a lot of room to move to begin with, and now even less. You’re starting to warm up in your suit and breathing gear.

Looking within a 4 meter long square tunnel made of four connected long wooden boards with slight gaps at the angles and filled along its length with irregular lengths of electrical wire, a firefighter is seen sliding headfirst down towards the camera, showing the top of their fluorescent yellow helmet, brown suit, and the black air bottle on their back. They are laying on their side facing the top-right corner of the tunnel, their air bottle pressed into the bottom-left corner. Their left arm is against their side, making space to slide down, while their right arm is stretched down the tunnel to control the descent.
Stuck.

While there are several ways to deal with this exercise, the most important rule to keep in mind is: take your time, conserve your air, and remain calm. Figure out why you are stuck, slowly untangle yourself, and try again.

In the horizontal tunnel, this is fairly easy. Move yourself back a bit, get yourself free by feeling where you are currently stuck, and try again. Maybe move into a slightly different position, try a new approach.

But moving down an angled tunnel, this is different. You’re also dealing with your own weight. You need to keep yourself in place, and conserve your breathing while you’re heading down head-first. Staying calm is key. Pushing yourself back up to try something else costs air and energy, making you sweat more.


Most advice here can in some way be applied elsewhere. Software development, for example. I can think of many a time where I was stuck on a problem — a bug, some code that just wouldn’t work as intended — and the solution turned out to be to take my time, take a breath, try again. Or try another approach. Don’t stress out – remain calm. Let that subconscious mull it over. Go for a walk, take a shower, grab a cup of coffee… get away from the problem for a bit. When you come back to the problem, you might suddenly see what has you unable to move forward.

Even when in a tighter spot — a deadline, a problem on production, let’s say — these principles remain. More often you’ll get more stuck rushing through. Or make the situation worse. You get the idea.

When handling an incident, running up a set of stairs while carrying equipment, it’s still wiser to catch your breath for 30 seconds before masking up, than to rush, be winded, and run through your air too fast.

I’m looking forward to some more training with these tunnels – let’s see how I do if some buddies flip the tunnel upside-down when I’m halfway through.

And finally – don’t be afraid to ask for help. As firefighters, we enter a building in pairs, and stick close to one another. If you’re stuck and you can’t find a way out – the help you need may come from the next person.

Two firefighters in black fire suits and neon green helmets are standing outside a brick building's metal door, facing each other. They are wearing breathing gear and red air bottles on their backs. One of the firefighters is holding the helmet flap of the other, checking for possible exposed skin. On the tiled ground is a green firehose. In the far background another building can be seen, a green shipping container standing in front of it.
Checking each other’s gear before heading inside.

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