Global Amnesia vs. Goethean Relevations

The blog Laudator Temporis Acti cited a few lines from Euripides today in a post entitled: "Transient Global Amnesia". The lines read: "What place did I leave to get here? How did I arrive?/ I cannot remember: my former state of mind has left me." I had written of my own experience of such on my other blog - but the lines reveal the state to be a predicament.
I am still busy, with troubled heart, working my way out of it - and coincidentally today read a beautiful explanation of the phrase τετιημένος ἦτορ, troubled in the heart at Sententiae Antiquae: To be troubled in the heart is essentially to be "occupied with [one's] own thoughts, living in an internal dream rather than engaging in the outside world".
The dreaming is prompted by being faced by a dreaded, constrictive future. The S.A. post ends with a suggestion of the way out from this: a heart that "grows" through "listening to the speech of other men". What speech of other men can cure the effects of global amnesia?
Firstly, it should be pointed out that not all global amnesia is self-inflicted. What of the lives of what I could call "hybrid babies" (taking the Bakhtinian word): those whose earliest and formative years were not steeped in the local? If transient globality is amenesia, what is remembering to one who never "left" to forget in the first place? Finally, what is the local to one who seeks to be a "citizen of the world"?
We know that Goethe, to some extent, popularized such concepts in more modern times. For example, in his Eckermann conversations in which he famously spoke of his idea of world literature, he said: "poetry is the universal possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere, and at all times, in hundreds and hundreds of men." The poet is to present, "something higher and better" in a manner intelligible to a place and time (thence, Shakespeare "makes his Romans Englishmen"). There is no superficial adventurism here (we remember, "adventure" was scorned even by Barthes in his essay on "Neither ... Nor Criticism"). Goethe explicitly says the point is not to seek "unheard-of adventures" but to masterfully re-present the wisdom of the ancients. Western cultures should draw on ancient Western wisdom. This is an answer to "global amnesia".

This is also the alethia of "saying" something that "means" (I am quoting Gadamer): saying something that "serves to clarify something". The task of the modern hybrid person is to find such meaning, and I argue that the hybrid person has more at stake to find such meaning, because that meaning is the only home they will ever have. That person knows, too, like what Gadamer via Heidegger, says: "there can never be a total recovery of meaning" (emphasis added). But this is no modern idea! Hadot has done marvelous work in The Veil of Isis tracing the idea that some knowledge will always be concealed existed in various guises from antiquity until quite recently. Hybrid people feel their incompleteness: it is their τετιημένος ἦτορ. Hopefully, though, they find counsel in "the speech of other men" and, like Goethe encouraged, craft something new and "make something of a simple subject". Incidentally, I once blogged of the work of another graduate from one of my boarding schools who made something unique: Mrinalni Sarabhai, who made her culture intelligible to other cultures through dance. One wonders if she understood the needs of the foreign audience through her own early uprooting to that foreign culture, during formative years...

Book in background: Boucher's 1,000 Years of Fashion. Brush: Ewansim via DeviantART.

Ghosts Abroad

This post has been revised. 
A word possibly derived from a Medieval toponym, of the place where horses were raised that were hired out for work, hack, I think, is a word that could be applied to many people who travel today and seek to make money from their "observations" sold to any genre of publication. These people do not see the irony of living at enclave addresses or gathering at places approved by Facebook: even offbeat venues play to some tune of conformity, just like the average traveller of Victorian times would follow in the footsteps of those who wrote travelogues. Perhaps those journals are more transparent than ours that claim everything: we can ask ourselves how much of the local was experienced in the 18th century when ladies were travelling with their own baths (portable amenities today are tiny by comparison). I write as one whose childhood travels involved my mother learning and teaching us native languages and one who learned to keep balance on two planks over deep pits. The family shunned tours, once almost driving off a cliff in a rented jeep in Thailand because the map did not account for recent landslides.
We are 鬼佬; "ghost geezers" (white people), but my father joked at one of the 西貢 restaurants that his wife was the only white woman in the room. Maybe we became ghosts too well, not even seeing ourselves, silent cultural observers always looking to pass through barriers (to thought).
But sometimes it is we who block out all the wrong things: we composite narratives, like stereotype blocks, and it takes courage to discard it, so hard to give up ideas or furniture one has become comfortable with, and begin again. For example, one might feel as if the foreigner is often the target of a kind of hellish treatment and feel isolated, or resentful. Then one fine day, one might discover that even locals are exposed to this same hell, Dorothy Parker's "fresh hell."
Rather than travel in the ruts, it is necessary to be exposed, like the teeth of yesteryear. While I doubt ghosts have a need to laugh, already relieved of terrestrial gravities, the "west ocean ghost" seeks endearment through deprecatory humour.

And it is precisely the haughtiness of so many of today's travellers that is irksome. They think they can live in a place for a few months or years and know it. Stereotypes are set. This is not a new complaint, and is its own stereotype: in Innocents Abroad, Twain criticises the tourism industry that manufactured and sold history.
Still, there was a period a few decades ago marked by the eccentric traveller who never promised objective accounts but the symbiosis of whatever their extreme personalities, or specific context and character, would bring out of a place (Gore Vidal, Jan Morris' geographies-some invented, Marguerite Duras), rather like the travelogues of Montaigne, who brought descriptions of his bodily functions to a place, always him in it, no claims of mind over map, but him moving through scenes.
If "abroad" means away from home, the hearth, then perhaps this is why the ghost gets nearest to new destinations. Some aspects of a place will always remain invisible, and this is what the ghost knows, this is why the ghost is suspicious of the stereotype, preferring instead the furniture that blocks out empty spaces. A place, like a person, is always only just coming into itself, to that clearing where something can be defined, before it shifts. So the stereotype block, which looks like a means to save time, to make things easier, is only confusing things.
A passage by Antonio Rosmini reads: "Knowing where the problem lies represents an important stage on the way to the attainment of truth, which cannot be assailed in its hidden stronghold unless the fortress defending it has been inspected from all sides." The ghost can pass through these sides, but the person, stuck in the dimensions of the body, can not always maneuver that well. As Gadamer pointed out in Truth and Method, man can never attain entire objectivity precisely because he can never leave his body.
To travel receptively is to be at home with ghosts, to be one. It is only scary insofar as it is sometimes less words than white spaces.

Brushes: Pfefferminzchen at DeviantART; Lauren Harrison.

Correspondences

It is a curious sensation to jog through the twilight into dusk. Just as the sky turns to that deeper blue, lights turn on as if one has sunk into the sea, only guided by stars or phosphorescence. Another way in which to connect with the world, touching the evening air, raining perspiration. A way to grasp one's tiny cosmos, testing its minute limits. I remember training capoeira late in the evening in the empty Alvin Ailey rehearsal spaces, the air still stiff from effort, and imagining how the dancers moved in all those little studios, bodies poised in space, muscles strained to suspend the body as moving statue, holding up fragments of our existence like the smooth pebbles brought to shore by a hush of waves. There we are.
In the 1940's, Balanchine made a ballet called The Four Temperaments, loosely inspired by the ancient idea that each of us is comprised of four temperaments, or humors: sanguine - capricious, sociable; choleric - dominating, ambitious; melancholic - creative but sensitive; phlegmatic - calm, shy. The humors are mixed, from the Latin temperare, but some say that one humor dominates. The language of the body may betray one's inner balance: learning elocution and poise has saved many from slouching or being overbearing; mumbling, or talking too loud.
I have a friend who believes that we can never really move away from the essence of our being, our main humor, whatever it is. We may refine it, but not change it completely.
And we would never have spoken about humors had I not asked why it is that not everything is up to us in life. For example, how it is possible that self-restraint could not be up to a person. His view is that the wish to be moderate is not the same thing as having the will to live that way at all times. Having a strong will, in his view, depends on a person's humor.

Yet according to the science of humorism, there is a way to keep the humors in balance. A system of correspondences was drawn up in ancient times to explain, diagnose, and cure exaggerations. This system is not unlike 五行, Wu Xing, which, among other things, can prescribe the right foods and temperatures to people whose emotions are uneven.
These correspondences are much more profound and scientific than Baudelaire's Corréspondances - whose volume Fleurs du Mal begins with the spleen, which corresponds to the choleric. Baudelaire would seem to prove my friend's theory: his exaggerated sentiments lead him to an imbalanced end, not without first straying, searching in that wild yet limited modern way, lured by intoxicating wine, anonymous city crowds, physical pleasure - all leading him to despair and death. How different and differently- named his poems would have been had he treated his yellow bile.
Ideals, Baudelaire shows us in Spleen et idéal, are not enough - they are to be tempered by the perfectionist sensitivity of melancholy, which may pick up on the beginnings of mistakes, not wanting to make any.
But without foods and classical elements to better our awareness of our personalities, perhaps we forget to strive for balance. Also, just because the humors may not be actual substances, per se, does not make them any less real. As far as I am concerned, it is a fact that certain foods have their effects - foods like ginger, or warm corn congee, or cold water.
I have been doing a lot of running and thinking lately (hence the reference to the cold water, never a good idea) and one morning, as I looked up at someone's balcony, I saw the same mobile in the window as I used to see in a 72nd street apartment. I had that feeling again that life depends so far less on externals, including even country of abode, than it does on our inner state. The person at harmony with themselves is better able to look up and out - to see those little signs of personal significance - that help us solve the riddle of ourselves, even when we are not so lucky to get standing room tickets to watch ballerinas act it all out for us below.
Maybe too much energy from within can catapult us out of our own orbits. But hopefully if we do not run away with ourselves, we will find ourselves again, and balanced may be restored.

Brush. Magazine.

Street Level

We can carry around huge truths of ourselves without ever knowing what they are until one day, in the haircutter's mirror, we see that picture: of the Universal. Such a realisation came to me at such a salon, which, because this city is what it is, had to move above street level to stay in business: no one would ever know it was there unless they'd been to it first. What resilience there is here - rather, it just happened to be here that I noticed such resilience. I travelled half the world to realise that the whole world is everywhere - including in myself.
So I'm like that ragwort fluff that floated into train carriages in Victorian England, remaining suspended there until the movement of exiting passengers caused the seeds to float out again, with them, taking root somewhere far from their origins. And all the love I have for this locality has turned into an increased love of humanity, and what I love from here is what is universal, valuable insofar as it can be recognised by distant others. For example, the Rastafari movement is specifically black with its own principles of spirituality - but young people around the world identify with its universal aspects, such as the struggle for dignified independence through peace.
To have a universal, vertical, without a local, horizontal, means that one is but theorising. Any time we apply ideas, they become horizontal, and usually enmeshed - being at street level. The perfectionist tends towards the vertical, which is also a tenet of much Asian religion. But as I was reading Tagore yesterday, I realised that no universalist would choose to live in the clouds: he is too concerned with the well-being of his fellow man, regardless of creed/ origin, which brings him down again.

When I was a child, my love of India manifested into a gift I received of a book by a swami who wrote that one oughtn't descend too far down to the waters of life lest one get muddied. But now I think that you cannot get muddied (in your soul) if you descend to the water to retrieve a friend.
One undervalued tool of friendship is the imagination, which is not getting the room I think it deserves in popular culture. The imagination does not operate fully where there is money or constraint: the point of the imagination is that it is disinterested. I'm sure MFA students can explain this better than I can: when brainstorming, one must allow for a true democracy of ideas. In this democracy, we may imagine our friends in ways that brings out our compassion: the first bridge is formed from man to man.
And from this bridged structure - and all Chinese gardens have a bridge, this important symbol, there for meditation - we may think of larger-scale interactions. Like the platform given to us via blogging. Which brings me to the sad news that Google is folding its Reader: what a public service it was doing via Reader. It's just a shame that it was not honoured on time for its philanthropy. 
Where will we go in the future to exchange our ideas, in the democracy of imagination, which is the first stage behind all later productive activity? It is strange that humankind gives precedence to certain activities over others because to my mind, if we do not tend to all fields, we ruin what we have through over farming. The field I see languishing is that of language, but who's listening today... I mean, in the sense that words have a meaning that can be, vertically speaking, above lives, above people, as Jaynes wrote.
Even 40 years ago, when Julian Jaynes wrote his epic on how consciousness is not in the brain but in language, his book was critiqued out of serious debate. It is suggested he should have written it not as scientific theory but as literary provocation - because at least that way, his ideas would have got more currency. Pun intended.
So with my words - and words seem ever less important particularly as they require work to be understood - I shall return to the picture of the hairdresser's where I sat this morning and wondered at how, despite being comprised of talented cutters, the only sign of the salon's existence is in the sculpted hair of its customers. Maybe this is what is happening to the internet: a lot may be removed from street level...

Nail varnish element. Magazine.

Live For Humanity

That was one of George Whitman's phrases, a man who, since his passing, has inspired so many a eulogy online. I only remember him in a thankful haze, but I laughed in recognition when I read this post - with him exclaiming, "That person was a lunatic!" I, too, attended the Sunday teas where I met a panoply of characters: an attached young man who knit his own sweaters (obvious without his admission), who was studying at Le Cordon Bleu, and who would sometimes bring me food he had made in class - what special gifts. There was also the Parisian who claimed - I still shudder at the thought - he would cut pictures out of library books and paste them onto the ceiling of his chambre de bonne.
It was an incredible time to be in Paris, though, perhaps anyone would say that of any charismatic city. There was a Walter Benjamin retrospective at the Pompidou: Le Passant, La Trace, and I am happy to have come to that thinker in such a tactile way: looking through the stereoscopes and at the toys and placards that shaped Benjamin's mind as child and adult - that made up the "modern city" in which he was a passer-by.
I am reminiscing about Paris, but mostly about those who I have known and who have passed on, because I was thinking about such things deep into the night. I suppose I am approaching middle age, well, its lower limits, and I was thinking of the models I hope to emulate if I reach the apex of maturity, like my dear friend I wrote of here.
Yet, I am also relieved that my morning reading brought me to the thought of place as well as people, for it has given me new avenues for thought. How much is place etched into our heart and vice versa? Here, one of the central museums has long closed its shuttered eyes; a winter liability with the mammoth icicles that hang themselves from its upper stories while intrepid locals pass by below. Le passant, la trace... What is the purpose of our lives, what is the trace we hope to leave behind, that little snail trail, always threatened by effacement. Yet is it not also in tandem with place that we make our claim to having lived? Even in this modern age, we are still like plants, needing some soil in which to pot our dancing feet.
In the Benjamin exhibit, he is also presented as one in exile - thus begins the modern tension between several geographic belongings: but as the curator showed: Benjamin is Berlin. Benjamin is Paris. He is also, he is both. I often imagine such paradoxes in Rilke: born in Prague, reborn in Russia, learning to speak in Paris, then wandering to Trieste, Munich, Ronda, Sierre... No wonder he invested so much into trying to reach the universal. And this is the note on which I will rest. All I can do is to try to figure out a tiny part of the equation explaining human experience, make one tessera of contribution. I decided not to worry this year, so all that is left is to live in good faith, and preserve any silvery trails like treasures.

Elements.

Stones and Memories

It was a rocky weekend - at first. I was stuck on how the past can seem so distant, disconnected, and was thus weighed down. As I tried to sing along to tunes from where I grew up, I could not because my language skills have dwindled through disuse. One of the videos I perused began with the chimes of a clock at a ferry pier, where a near-by building housed a public library branch. I could tell you many things about that library and its books, but what I want to talk about today were the other floors in that building. One was a gallery of calligraphy and 国画, often referred to as Chinese watercolor or scroll painting. The latter uses the same techniques as the former: there is a 'right way' to paint, and much copying is done before one can paint one's own vision.
Most of the 国画 I saw as a small child was antique - so despite having friends who learned these techniques, I could only understand the painting as very drab, seeing as I was thinking of those darkened scrolls dating back so many dynasties ago. Only later did I come to understand how dynamic the compositions are. When they depict plants, each leaf seems to represent a jagged or graceful emotion; usually, too, there is an intriguing detail, like a little worm, a butterfly, or even the plant being reflected in a mirror. When they are of landscapes, one can observe the panorama, and then observe minute details of the landscape - like the mossy rocks, or intermissions of tiny staircases along mammoth mountains. But to my mind, a key feature of these paintings are the rocks (take a look, and see how many rocks are on this page). I also associate rocks with the ideal that nature is the master artist; that man, no matter how intelligent, can but humbly imitate it.
I think we all carry rocks in life. I literally brought some sea rocks back from Greece last year, now displayed in a ceramic dish on my desk, where I joyful rearrange them sometimes. Some of the rocks that we carry threaten to weigh us down. I think it is a matter of grace and honour to learn how to deal with them.
Sometimes we can lose a precious stone, like losing a language, yet the space of the language remains - and this can become a heavy rock of pain, unless one learns to paint this rock on the landscape of one's soul. This morning I was reading about Indian diplomats who write poetry in order to fill an emotional part of their life, not related to their profession. The more we open up our lives to a breadth of experience, in different countries or through a wide variety of friends, the more pain there is. Nobody tells you that as they say "it's so wonderful you've lived in so many countries". Nobody warns you that the more you get to know intimately, the more you will have to say goodbye. The more your heart will be in one place, but feel the violin twangs of calling out to visit a place from before.
So words, word pictures, pictures, music - art, can fill this void, can be the rub-off transfer for the rock that would otherwise ail. I do not think that we are to unload ourselves in art, as if it were simply therapy. Rather, like the Japanese stone garden or Chinese scholars' rocks (供石) I think we are to sort through our memories and stones, and create the idyllic landscape: a "best of".
There is a reason why there is a 'right way' to paint calligraphy. Order, mindfulness, and discipline are beautiful. Even the best of the "folk" artists express their own methodicalness. These days, I am dreaming of what my own idyllic landscape would be. We speak so much of what the "literature of the immigrant" or "exile" is - but what of the person who grows up in different lands, and misses them all? It is not an imagined landscape, yet it is not one that exists anywhere except in the heart and soul. I wonder how to paint it in the 'right way', in a way that is not just private.

 Watercolour dots.

Wabi-sabi

Today I want to write about the minimalist, economic aspect of wabi-sabi.

There was a time I possessed a lot of things, especially books. But given my post-youth need to travel, I decided to leave it all behind. I still hope to regain one particular suitcase of books I entrusted to a close one, but this is a subject for another time.

What I will tell you about those books here, is that there are very few of them (aside from Suitcase Books) that I miss. In fact, I am always astounded to discover that a certain author has remained with me after all these years - as a special friend might. One such author is Rilke. His Archaic Torso is a poem I often keep in front of me ("For here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.") But most authors have fallen away from my life like autumn leaves. Yes, I was an avid reader in my youth. And now, though I read, it is less for 'pleasure' so much as it is with the wish to uncover stones looking for gems: of truth, of wisdom.

A lot of those books of days of yore, to my mind, represent labyrinths that were deliberately or accidentally sealed off. Today, I view life as a labyrinth I wish to get through, and I am in search of the red thread, of love, of wisdom, of hope, that will provide serendipitous passage.

So, I am not sad at what I have left behind. Of course, I am not advocating here any kind of militancy in one's pursuit of simplicity; Suitcase Books tell you otherwise. But, there is plenty that is unnecessary.

On that note, may we relish these last days of winter, of bareness and economy (or welcome their arrival, if this is the reality of our hemisphere).

Photo collage inspiration: pugly pixel; elements: maybemej and zeldona at Mellowmint

I've said before that every craftsman
searches for what's not there
to practice his craft. - Rumi
If there is no empty space, there will be no room for new growth.

*Those* changes

There was a time when I was less abashed than I am now; something about moving to a country that most people do not know how to find on a map can do that to a person. I have been thinking a lot about this blog and my wish to write - taking my invisible whereabouts into consideration, and how that has effaced my wish to be a fully public persona, for I had such ambitions at an earlier time. Especially when it came to my writing.

But when I came to this country, and was offered the possibility of writing assignments of the paying kind, I felt that by writing about this country, I would be selling it. I felt that nothing short of coming here, and experiencing it every day, could do it justice, especially given what it had been through, and how even one of my dearest professors aid of my coming here: you're going there? For goodness' sake, why?! This is what sealed me up behind walls of misunderstanding and not wanting to say anything to stir people up, because there are some countries that seem to rile people up more than others. (I think Root explained this best in Cannibal Culture.) You may notice that the name of where I live never appears on this blog.

It has made me think yet again about the ability to have a voice as a privilege. Sure, anyone can say what they want, but they will not be listened to with the same attentiveness as those in privileged countries, who, by default of a certain overall lifestyle, will share certain cliquish things in common. Which is nothing new - until one realises that when taken to the national level (in terms of having a voice on the international stage), negotiating space, for some, is riddled with additional difficulties that many people never encounter, and cannot even imagine.

What gave me beginners' words - brought a speech bubble back to my mouth, was the market, which I have blogged about many times, and was the starting point for this blog in its current genesis.

As someone who had to leave behind (and discard) boxes and boxes of written material in order to move here, I can say that the past decade has been something I never imagined I would experience. Why would I lose my voice? But in losing it, I am all the more conscious of what brought it back: the changing seasons as reflected in the full or empty rickety market stalls, how the pigeons sometimes take off in unison from the stall eaves, and as one looks up, one faces the open sky and a pattern of birds, while down below are the little paths between the stalls, which I have now memorised - and I know which vendors are where; it is a small enough place that one begins to recognise everyone after a while, there are some vendors I just say hello to, some who are greedy for money and will make up any tale to convince you to open your wallet, some grannies will not hand you your produce until they have added a few extra vegetables, the butcher gives you a discount if you smile consistently, the old grandpa who sells the potatoes, hammered chili powder and garlic does not like his relative who sells from the same stall when he returns to the village, there is a stall with Swiss cooking chocolate, another with imported undergarments with slashed labels - and prices...

How could one keep silent after all those exchanges? Fast forward to today, I want to start speaking with less reservation. I am even thinking of making this blog public. But there are still the other problems. Village mentality can mean that those who do not wish one well will snoop their noses and find any prized information one prefers to keep quiet.

But I crave conversation.

So I need to make some changes. I need to start being witty again, and I would like to add images to this blog. I spent a good part of this evening exploring new blogs, and marveling at those people who just write what they have to say, and take their stand.

It is understandable that a person in an invisible country have their legs erased, which makes it hard to have a stand. Who will understand you? But stranger things have happened. And I can't make my experience online real until I am more actively communicating. Communication is very real - regardless of medium.

And for now, I leave you with an image of our boat foray a few weeks ago, as a gesture of good will:

Beyond Spy vs. Spy

One summer a long time ago, I travelled to the South of France with some compatriots, who were more interested in making a whirlwind drive-by viewing of all the "must-sees." I just wanted to walk around, so we parted ways.
I went to the train station, and bought a ticket to a place a granny had told me about. When I got there (St. Jean de Luz), I noticed immediately that it was a resort for senior citizens. There was absolutely nothing for me to explore there. So, I found a hotel room that was near enough to the sea for me to at least hear the waves, bought a slice of my favourite cake (gateau basque), ate it by the beach, and the next day, I made my way towards another seaside town, said to be within walking distance. The directions I was given confused me at one moment, for I seemed to be going away from the sea, towards the distant mountain, and I found myself in a park with old men drinking at a cafe and playing boules, and they stared at me as I made my way through with a lack of conviction.
Then, I happened upon a tiny square: short edifices all crowding in on each other, and I noticed one facade to be that of a church. I went inside, and as I contemplated a statue of Christ (as a non-religious teenager), this was the thought that occurred to me: leave your heart, but not your name.
I think I was much wiser at that time, and I only think of it because yesterday a friend was talking about Mother Teresa. When I was a child, I was fascinated by her, and one of my parent's friends who sometimes took me out to lunch brought me photos he had taken of her when he was shooting in Calcutta. I wrote to him about my experience in the South of France, and was surprised when I heard (through hearsay) that he was mocking my adolescent epiphany.
As I think back now, trying to remember my fascination with this selfless character, Mother Teresa, (in the language here, the word for character comes from the word face or image, which can be connected to "in God's image"), I am now filled with memories of bringing the elderly plastic-cup-fulls of orange cordial, and a short time I spent at an incredible organisation, The Home of Loving Faithfulness, an establishment founded by two British women for people with special needs, who were rejected by the government facilities for being "hopeless cases."
I remember one woman there who enjoyed sitting on her skateboard and having armfuls of stuffed toys. She did not allow anyone to take even one of these stuffed toys from her. There are others I remember, but will not write about. And then, the one I spent most time with. A woman who would just lay there, staring into space. Every day, I would look at her, and try to get her to look out the window (there was a nice view). One day, she looked at me, turned her head at turtle's pace to the window, and smiled. I saw these people not as "challenged" but as possessing (and having developed) gifts that we also have, but throw away as we pursue the unnecessary-because the unnecessary has its charms. I think that we can become aware of these gifts by spending time with those who have been called out of the world in a very specific way.
What I mean is that when I think of many people who surround me at this time - a situation rife with gossip, hearsay and egos, all of the tension seems so unnecessary. So why is it such a problem? Black spy's tactics lead to white spy's tactics for what seems like an eternity. That gets boring and frustrating, so it is a real question: why do people trick themselves into thinking that such an approach is useful?
When I think back to my child self and my wish to help like Mother Teresa, I feel like I need to renew my inner orientation. Yesterday, my friend told me that she had had moments of doubt, such doubt, that she would say if there is a God, may He have mercy on her. Can we imagine looking at lepers every day? Leprosy of the soul is one thing (and thankfully rare), but what of the situation when it is visible, when the discomfort is constant, so rife and abundant?
So many people today are nervous about the economic situation. I am, too. But my main concern has been more general, that I have made certain life choices that put me in a different socio-economic category than my education and background would otherwise prescribe. But what is the use of getting all excited about these things? The people in the Home of Loving Faithfulness do not have such preoccupations. And, by our standards, shouldn't they have more?
What we can do at this time and at any time is to measure our lives in terms of our resources: are we making use of what we have, or dreaming beyond our limits? Making use of what we have... One knows one is doing this if one is being creative. Life is not about buying something finished, but using one's creative faculties to reach a solution, that may change along the way.
Then there is the other part, which has to do with kindness towards others, which care-givers and parents already do by default of their callings. I hope I do not sound like I am preaching; this is not my intention, rather, I feel that there are certain universal truths - that all religions and cultures acknowledge. This is what I wish to discuss.
I am beginning to think that part of this kindness involves opening up certain dialogues. Isn't it true that we shine to the best of our potential when we are with certain people? They just bring out the best in us? Well, isn't it up to us to help bring out the best in others? We all want to enjoy our lives, so making it clear to someone that one is not interested in, say, gossip, releases both speaker and listener. The changes we are called to make can be the tiniest, but still important, changes.
If there were a prescription, I would go with this: leave your heart, but not your name. In the end, what lasts the longest? Love does. And anyway, which side are we on?

"How did you get here?"

Does the question not look familiar? I have heard bloggers/magazine editors ask that of their readers; advertisers use programmes to calculate it; successful people being asked it, &c, &c.
There is also something inherently fascinating about tracking the course of a person's life. And isn't it curious that the hardships people face in pursuit of a goal seem diminished when they recount their path to fulfillment? People will abandon you as you are on "the way," but everyone will want to be your friend if you make it. I feel like I am doing a poor imitation of Lao Tzu when I write that.
I was just listening to a podcast on The Moth, which I had never heard of before today, in which a man from an astronaut family recounts how he made his trip to space as one of the first civils to do so. It is a 15-minute story, which leaves out the years of waiting - and surely the times of doubt. I think that we all have many more goals than we are even aware of, and it is only in their realisation that we fully become conscious of them (otherwise, they remain dreams). The story was so compelling: mostly due to the raconteur's humility, but also due to the way he presented his certainty of purpose as being present early on. Is such a perspective not afforded best through retrospect? This is the power of climax, an effect that is relative to an individual's life. To tell a story "backwards" (from the perspective of new information obtained later) reorders our understanding of our own lives as they happen, and inspires us to look for "auspicious signs" along the way. (I would say "writing on the wall," but the origin of this phrase is rather grim - a moral warning for the heartless.)
Do we notice the signs that predict our direction?
I have had to answer the question in this blog's title many times. Even if I had never been interested in narrative, writing, etc, such circumstances (like being a "stranger") do require the story. As writers know, a story needs purpose to be good - but what I find in telling a story of self as it is happening is that the story lends back to the experience in crystalising the purpose. Being asked the question already forces the answerer towards some kind of resolution. (But here lies a trap: the narrower the range/depth of the question, the less truthful the answer will be. There will always be history and culture involved - and this is only scratching at the surface. Beneath this is something like etymology; the symbols, the higher meaning, genesis...
There is another trap: not all stories are true, or resonate with self. The subject is not always what one "wants," but it is something valuable - though it comes with harsh criticism, and this is probably why one loses track of it for a while before regaining it in full knowledge of its worth, ready this time to keep it.)
When I began this post, I had the phrase "stick-in-the-mud" on my mind; I felt apologetic for often wanting to dig behind the surface of things for the earlier, original meaning. I thought I could be termed a "sitck-in-the-mud." But this phrase refers to someone who enjoys remaining in the mud, and is not interested in moving to cleaner, brighter circumstances. So, perhaps the one who never questions behind the question is the one who is stuck in the mud. We are all called to our true forms; we can all have our fascinating answer to the question: "How did you get here?" The question requires movement: from before to forwards.
Another aspect of The Moth podcast that I appreciated was that the raconteur, on the way to accomplishing his purpose, launched his career - and very successfully so - in a topically unrelated field. It reminded me of the Chinese proverb, which is something like: the willows you so carefully tended to did not bear fruit, but the seeds that you accidentally dropped by the wayside created an abundance of shade. Purpose does not have to lie in the obvious, and can actually begin as secondary to the story. Purpose is achieved in the resolution, so there is an aspect of mystery and transformation involved.
Today, despite the fact that it was -5C, I went out on my friend's boat, and as per the way such outings go, my other friend went out on his kayak. Everything on the river was totally still. There weren't even ducks, just the occasional seagull. And later, a swan pair that I first thought were statues until one of them moved. All I could hear was the motor, and the splash of the water. Not another person out on the water. Not another person on the little floating houses scribbled on the shore. And at the horizon, the water and the sky disappeared into a fog.
When we finally got to the fish restaurant, there were about twenty men singing to a guitar and banjo, raising their small glasses.
If I think of any activity that would string together the purposeful moments of life, this would be the penultimate activity, even though I got back a few hours ago and am still shivering.
There is something very important in the "how" of the question.
But the true origin of the question is "you," because if it weren't for a "you," the question would be redundant. So, the human being has more agency than we might at first think. And "agency" has its roots in "effective," "powerful," "to do" and --- "set in motion."
The 15-minute story ought not be Warhol's prediction about fame, which is possibly coming true for many on Facebook. But something of more content - that clearly leaves out other stories that could be just as interesting.

Christmas winds

We are having our first real day of snow; I was out at the market when I saw it start to fall, confusing the pigeons and twirling beneath the little tin stalls that happened to be crammed with second hand furs today where there are usually small potted plants and trees.
More and more often, kids throw crackers from the roofs, making that loud sound that, as the Chinese say, would be sure to scare all the evil spirits away.
It is time to find a hat that fits and cover one's ears from the local wind that brings icicles to even those days that are temperate.
Wine is mulled at all social events, and fairy lights can be found in some of the stores.
Winter has come, and at this time for the Christian world, thoughts go to the new beginning of beginnings: in the depth of the cold heart of winter, the brightest of rays of hope is planted that spreads its wings to take flight each spring. Who would think that the quietest, darkest time would bring such warmth and optimism.
And I play the old-time tunes of Bing Crosby, Perry Como, Frank Sinatra - all the carols I have known from childhood, and begin to honour those few traditions that I realise I can make a claim to...
There was a time I shunned personal tradition, firstly as expat traditions tend to be dispersed by the transient minorities, secondly lest what remained not be stripped away by circumstance, but now I view these little things as something precious - like those antique ornaments we used to have to wrap in swathes of tissue every year, and unwrap as the father wound the christmas tree bark with lights, and then artfully strung them on the branches at harmonious spacings.
The thought that came to mind as I mulled these traditions over, thinking, too, of national histories, is that change is part of the natural course of life; we will not be able to retain all we wish to. But this does not mean we need to prematurely let things go.
There is a moment in the multi-cultural childhood where one may no longer know who one is, having done so much listening to others. Perhaps listening is like flying up above; there is a moment when one has to come back down to one's little histories and little traditions; whatever warms the heart, whatever circumstance left as presents, like jeweled shells brought in by the waves, deposited upon the sandy shores. We do not choose those shells, but they are the ones that are given to us.
Sometimes I have felt like that Sydney Sheldon poem about not waving, but I think that the course we chart depends in part on those aspects of ourselves that require resolution. Some people go deep into adulthood without tying up loose ends; some never finish and unravel at the end of their days. We do not choose how complicated or simple our lives are. We do choose how we deal (and whether to deal) with what we are given.
I have always resented the "wow, you've lived an interesting life" comment because nothing could be more false. I have know people better-travelled than me, but not all of them could tell you about what they have seen. I have also met people who have hardly travelled at all, who seem to be receptors for all kinds of ideas and feelings; they may not have experienced certain things first hand, but they possess an intuitive understanding. And if we add to these equations emotional territory, it gets even more complicated. The inner in interaction with the outer.
Christmas songs enjoyed in childhood can be forgotten until one has the peace to put that puzzle back together: in my case, this peace has come through this very long trip I have taken to a place which to many people is very, very far away, though this concept is so odd to me today, because thanks to aviation, everything is close - but apparently (for some people when they think of certain places) not conceptually so. I think distance is a reflection of our humanity; when we are in touch with ourselves, all people feel close to us because we understand something of our common nature. Culture is but a wispy silk scarf in comparison with the stony sword of fear or the tight blindfold of confusion.
It may be quite harrowing for some to come face-to-face with their existence which is always more fragile than we imagine. That first moment of recognition is humbling, because until we have worked on ourselves for a long time, the image in the mirror is lacking. Maybe it is necessary to strip everything away, and only add back what is essential. Or maybe this emptying out is an extreme approach to a process that does not have to be that way. I would guess that the harder our lives, the more inclined we are to strip it all away in an attempt to make the final picture that much more beautiful and compelling. An exercise in hyperboles: if the beginning is larger than life, the symbolism will also be such. These are the workings of literature: the good story is one where objects are not their true size.
So in this story of Christmas, the song comes back, song as the face of courage; song as what we do to ward off the loneliness, to pass the time, to raise our spirits. The little things of humanity, that make memories, that are the only signs we have of a life well lived, whatever the culture, whatever the songs. But the song only gains meaning after the drought, after the long odyssey, and even then, only those who have travelled the way see the hidden layers of meaning. What is returned to after the change; these are the Christmas winds, and what may we return to always be the better wine.

Flight from the insular

Which is not to hark back to "each man is an island;" though perhaps it does, indirectly. I literally grew up on an island, and do not refer to this word in a literal sense, either.
The insular can be found everywhere.
There is much advice to the tune of "do not pay heed to the lesser." The only image I can conjure to mind in the ugly face of the insular is an illustration of the Little Prince, to the caption: "In order to make his escape, I believe he took advantage of the migration of wild birds."
One cannot maintain a life of flying, but it does make sense to take advantage of the more auspicious situation that one can count on finding in the face of adversity. Entire journeys transpire as one looks to escape the restricted. The restricted has an intense need to shrink everything to its dimension.How uncomfortable and reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland.
Some of the people where I live have this terribly annoying habit of asking a thousand questions. They are very adept at bringing the conversation back to these questions despite one's Houdini-esque attempts to make it otherwise. They look to net in information to use against their interlocutor (at a later time).
But the bigger picture shows their efforts in vain. No life is contained in "information," which incidentally seems to have been first used (in the 14th century) to mean incrimination; indeed, I wonder if the sense is that different today. Doesn't the connotation of information imply a lack of context? How insular!
But ultimately, the island is in the ocean, which connects all continents.
It has been said that one's enemies are one's gruff friends; would there be flight without this toil, this face-off with adversity? The spiritually impoverished looks to take a jab or return the blow, depending on the situation; the other rises above it, and low and behold, one is airborne, like in this song (albeit towards the end). Which reminds me of a person I met this past week. A Korean born and raised in Russia. When she asked where I was from, there was no pressure. I joked about being an egg; she said: "People ask me where I am from and when I say Russia, they don't listen. What do I know about Korea? I did not grow up there; we ate borscht at home."
She then gave me the recipe for borscht.
So, it just goes to show that if one is a banana or an egg, one must be good at flying.

Those Strings

Talk about a cliché, but there are times when I envision my heart as a violin, played by the vibrations and harmonies of certain ideas. This thought worked its way to being articulated today because I am going through one of those I-want-to-return-to-all-the-countries-I-grew-up-in phases again these days. It is always such an internal ordeal.
My heart aches for dumplings at those modest market-side restaurants with garage-door openings and hot daan taat at the special afternoon time when everyone lines up outside the bakeries with their protruding elbows; I want to hear phrases like dai go dai in real life and look to see who is being praised; I want to drink coffee across from the Pompidou and look for the place I used to go for wine and cheese at the Marais; I want to ride my bicycle over the GW bridge to the Palisades, or walk by the little red lighthouse and admire the river all the way to the boathouse at 72nd.
All so melodramatic.
I still have not figured out a way to quell these stormy melodies. If anyone has, what is the trick? Longing is sometimes such a dry, exhausting desert - nothing to do with how I imagine the Blue People laughing as they drink tea in their Algerian tents. These may have been the Saharan people described by Herodotus. Can I trade stories for brief excursions to the lands I knew from yesteryear? But what for: some wander in vain. The nomads had an aim. Is this stirring feeling in the bones like a mirage - or better, like a Siren, calling out to the weary sailor? Or, like a shuttle, must one keep going over whatever warp one has wound until one has brought coherence and structure to a final piece?

What the mask told me

No, the mask does not speak - in a literal sense. But I have often thought that one can "hear" or "read" works of art, and argued such in my first university thesis. Art has a narrative. To "hear" art, one must look at it in silence for a long time. But then, there is also the knowledge one ought to have of the context of the piece, in order to hear it properly. Hear/read - essentially I am talking about an approach akin to a reader response theory, wherein the text is visual. The reason I write "hear" and not "read" is that the visual has more immediacy than a text. Anyway.
Today I was looking at The North Wind Mask, thanks to the MET's daily work of art RSS feed.
The description explained that in the performance cycles "that were important in maintaining proper human, animal, spirit-world interactions," the ceremony in which this particular mask was used would represent spirits that were both benevolent and malevolent to the community.
In the book "Cannibal Cultures," Root argues that a problem in the Western world is the exclusion of all "bad" elements, and projecting them onto victim cultures (usually poorer ones), and then consumes them. Such an unrealistic assignment of labels and a willing blindness to the true situation at home will be to the detriment of cultures that do this, she writes.
While it is important to acknowledge the malevolent, if one calls upon the ceremony of the North Wind Mask, it becomes clear that the purpose of acknowledging the malevolent is to understand its place in a structure that affords ultimate harmony to a society.
I would say the biggest detractor from such harmony comes from always wanting to be the victor. In society today, we are told that the loser will be effaced. Nobody wants to be effaced - in fact, some of the most meaningful cultural artifacts have been built for the preservation of memory - and of these, the most magnificent are those dedicated to a shared memory and to a higher, benevolent purpose. To be remembered; memory in a good light.
As if being remembered in other people's hearts is not enough, man is often sacrificed without his conscious consent.
This is nothing new; were not the games of ancient days also highly competitive, was not a foreign tongue inscribed on the walls of conquered lands.
But what if one is not on the side of the powerful or the victor? What if one is in between? Does one, like the Chinese official scholar of bygone days retreat to a forest dwelling? Or learn to speak in code? It is an act of irony to use all one's strength to try to reach meaning that actually makes sense for all the lost and tangled pieces, and then realise that one cannot speak of such things openly, but must again obfuscate the path through symbols that only the one who uses all their strength will learn to decode. But maybe the best ideas must be silent, because they only gain their ultimate meaning through the intention of the seeker.
But to return to the matter at hand, all of this is not to advocate speaking of the ill for the sake of it, but to give it it's proper place: not to focus on it, but to assign it a position in the constellation, for it has a meaning - and ultimately it cannot be wished away, so the competent mind will seek how to assign it meaning. There will be a meaning to les chutes - granted that it may only be revealed from within a bigger performance, whose ultimate message is balance and harmony.

Those Ex-Race Horses

Back in the day, some of us used to take riding lessons, graduating from the Pony Club to the BHS, with full knowledge of how to tack our horses, having memorised that blue handbook and the dressage tests. We rode at a stable with ex-race horses, which meant they had a temper and were very fast (read: trot = gallop). So even the mediocre riders like myself had the occasional ride, when all the best horses had been taken, that were more like rodeo sessions and made one want to quit. Once, I went rode one of the naughtiest horses of all, because my mother said I could ride it. I could not. She could have, but that is another story. I was thrown to the ground and had the wind knocked out of me. And one of the women, who was as if born on a horse, who had brought in her own towering black beauty, so it was not an ex-race horse, witnessed the whole thing, and asked that I immediately get on her horse so I wouldn't spend the rest of my life dreading the creatures.
Her horse was so nice; like the kind children dream about, galloping in slow motion across the plains...
And I was thinking of this today as, for the second time this week, I was so pleased with this year's group of students. I don't want to get my hopes up, but it seems like after three years of students with egos bigger than their cahiers, this year, I may be cured of my occasional dread of teaching by students with whom it is possible to work. There is a reason we are told to get back on the horse, one day, there is a reason.

Experience and Togetherness

One day riding my bike in one of those metropolises I lived in, a guy rode up to me and started a conversation. It was a really hot day, and I welcomed the conversation to keep my mind off the tough ride, as I was going uptown and uphill. He invited me to go to the pool somewhere way up north one day, where he worked as a life guard. So, off I went that day, and was led to one of those pools that I haven't seen since boarding school, the old-fashioned cement kind. So, it was a surreal day. And then it was made even more surreal when I met a girl from Sweden who was so young, and yet had so much life experience. She told me about a friend of hers in school who wanted to commit suicide, and how she would argue with her against it, and how, in the end, she saved her friend by agreeing that she would slit her wrist with this girl, but that they would not slit their wrists too deeply. What a bizarre story. Of course, they both lived. The girl was severely reprimanded by her father, but she saved her friend. What has stayed with me all these years about that story is the level of self sacrifice on the part of that girl. How many people are there, I wonder, who would do that for a friend.
There is that Aristotelian saying. You don't know a man until you've shared the proverbial sack of salt with him.
It seems to me that at this time, in this age, not many people remember what friendship is (re-member). Some people so quickly resort to name-calling/labeling and push others away (bordering on the destructive, which is no good). One needs patience to be able to understand others, and also needs to be able to see life from someone else's view. And I don't mean a drug-induced postmodern prism; one can only truly see another if one knows where one stands. If one is centered. This is how one can control one's narrative, there will be a place for other narrative, but the other narrative will not overcome one's own sense of self.
These days, I keep coming back to the word "cure" (with the etymological root: concern; and with connections to the context of "making whole"). Who doesn't have hang-ups/problems? Are we not supposed to learn to lessen the moments of internal drama in our lives? Can we stand next to others and, experience what they do, and then try to articulate it for them? I think that this process can be intuitive, that one can do this without even being aware, and may get lost in other people's problems, but the point is: it is time to leave the tunnel and go out into the sunlight.

Flexibility, order and authority

If you ask a question in some countries, if you don't get a joke in response, you may get a novel. This is a defense mechanism against the general state of being uninformed about the status quo. The kind of reality that produces novels like The Good Soldier Svejk.

I really like order. I like good authority. Without it, chaos reigns, and chaos, while written about beautifully by Liu Sola ("the lump of chaos" -- essentially waiting to be defined, which can fly high, but plunge to terrible lows), is ugly, if you ask me. And I am an aesthete. In the sense that I wish to cultivate a beautiful life, beauty around me. Not to consume it. I have fixed ideas of what constitutes the beautiful, that were developed through observation.

And if I discuss observation, I must mention Ravenna. Everyone should go to Ravenna and observe the mosaics. San Vitale, San Apollinare (old and new), Galla Placidia's little chapel with the stars, the Palace of Theodoric. That was the first place where I understood the speech of the visual, and felt the possibility of miracles ("Pick up your bed, and go." - that was at the Palace, if I remember.)

I sat there with the binoculars lent to me by a couple met through the most serendipitous of events in Varenna, where I had been staying. She had been one of the first women journalists, who had covered stories in Egypt. They had met on Corfu. He had been recruited in the language unit of WWII. They told me to go to Ravenna, and may they be blessed for all that they left to me.

A love of Larkin's poetry (the spaces between things), the experience in Ravenna, most of all, her lining up of small objects to photograph them, or her typed up article she tried to get published in the New Yorker, about science, colour theory and a certain modern rendition of a tableau of the Last Supper. Many secrets are revealed through observation.

LOOK. Listen. Cross.

If there are no rules, we get crushed at the crossings. How many times in history have the crossroads been fearful places. I have a deep respect of order, though I would not say I worship it. It is a means to establishing harmony; what is it Voltaire wrote, about freedom being allowed insofar as it does not encroach on another's freedom...

So, there must be some degree of flexibility. But if one is in Svejk's world, flexibility boarders on the nonsensical. It is a world that requires a new order. It is a liminal world.

My question, then, is, what of order in times of transition? I can't just abandon order. I read today that we can choose our circumstances. But isn't choice relative? If you have many friends, will you just leave them? Or will you rally together strength to support each other? Is that not the weave and weft of flexibility and order?