Your own people aren't always exactly your own people.

In the past month, in terms of the tough standards I set for myself, I failed at life (out of exhaustion over exponentially-increased teaching duties) in that I allowed myself to be surprised by certain human behaviour.
In one instance, this surprise morphed within me into the enemy of the human being, the feeling of injustice. Intellectually I know that righteous indignation is a dead-end street: called in some languages a "blind corner", which is exactly what I mean here. I don't know that I would be blogging about this quite in this way, had I not come across the sentence I used as the subject here: "Your own people aren't always exactly your own people." It is a fecund sentence for contemplation. One illustration could be of quondam parentals leaving children to choose their own adventure with absolutely no guidance after the first teen year, who later think they have a right to be critical of said children.
But there is another meaning of the quoted sentence that I have been musing over. Another could be related to patriotism. My family has members living all over the world; I have always taken it for granted that one can be both a patriot and a cosmopolite (who can be humble enough to learn from other cultures). To a certain degree (and to be not at all humble for a moment), I also thought that such a generous patriotism was easier for compatriots like myself than for people hailing from other countries (for historical reasons). Compatriots who reach cosmopolite status share a curiosity for esoteric aspects of other cultures and have the intellectual capacity for such appreciation (gaining, for example, expert knowledge of their antiques), and are crowned by a humility, in part stemming from a knowledge of the complexities of the history of their own country...

But today, this approach has come under fire. There is a new kind of patriotism defined in more narrow terms, as if, if one does not comply with these narrow qualifications, one does not love one's country. I can understand that somewhat - it is a kind of reactionism, not unlike my own of righteous indignation mentioned above. But on the other hand, such an approach would warrant if not a fail then a very low grade in not only my class on culture but also my composition class.
To begin with the (advanced) composition class, I set the intellectual exercise that opinions are not academically valid; what is valid is a thesis that has support and is able to articulate and respond to (through rebuttal or concession) viewpoints that challenge one's thesis. In other words, students are welcome to their 'opinions' so long as they can articulate them in terms of viewpoints that might challenge them (yes, this is derived from δόξα). Part of the course is built on cultivating an imagination that can articulate other viewpoints (which I - again not humbly - take to be part of the intellectual legacy of my native land). Similarly, my advanced class on culture demonstrates through examples that a single culture can be paradoxical, and is often comprised of myriad competing world views. This even came up in my intro class: through the example, for instance, of how not all former colonies immediately ratified the Articles of the Confederation. Unity does not necessarily mean unanimity.
How do we respond to scarcity of agreement?
For some, this means that it is no longer a time for the "college games" of dialectics; to them, it means war. Truth can come back another day.

So I ask myself: how do I talk to someone who from the get-go is approaching questions through their agenda? (The new orthodoxy of secularism, or of zealous liberalism, is no more tolerant or different than any religion.) Are you, readers, also wanting to ask me why it's a problem to approach life through an agenda? When I tried, with my interlocutors of late, to explain the complexities of statecraft and the importance of grappling - as contradictory as it may seem - with even abstract ideas like 'truth' in the practical business of statesmanship, if I dared call on Plato, my interlocutors' eyes would glaze over. Which I know from teaching means I need to change my approach. So, in answer to my question of how to talk with agenda-driven interlocutors, reason is not the way. Or, one must learn to package reason differently.
Since yesterday, every time I think about this, I am left with an anecdote from Rumer Godden's autobiography, A House With Four Rooms, with which I shall close this blog post. She writes of how back in the day, authors would often receive requests for an autograph and/or signed photograph. She explains that before she knew better to respond only to those who sent return postage, she would oblige at least the many signature requests though the postage was costly (obliging the photograph requests would have been far too costly). "I had a letter from America with the usual request, sent an autograph and a little later" she writes, "had a second letter; 'Thank you for your autograph. We have had your handwriting analysed. You are mean, petty, selfish and greedy.'"

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.

Master of the House

This morning, what with the sunny hush that has descended upon this little city, with but a few car sounds reminding me of onwards, elsewhere, I decided to make a commitment to beginning this blog post honestly. Or maybe I am inspired to honesty because I saw the film My Dinner with Andre this weekend, and was struck by the part where Andre describes Grotowski giving up theatre because everyone was already performing so well in their own lives, already looking so much the stereotypical part. It may be a public service to reveal where the clay has cracked.
In the past few days, questions of livelihood and even righteous indignation seem to have found my address and have attempted to bang on my door. But to be truly hospitable is to sometimes offer such comers a big slice of silence. I do not want to let them in!
And we all know that in times of difficulty, it is best to keep one's mouth shut, as even well-wishers are tempted to dole out that sickly-sweet treacle of, everything will turn out fine - which, by the way, I believe is true, it's just that I think that particular message is a deeply personal one.
And while I began, at least in the second paragraph, with an admission, claiming to be honest, my admission is one that I do not take to heart, because experience teaches that obnoxious guests are but phantoms - from the φαντάζω family. Like ten days ago, the dentured, silver-permed woman who cleans my building couldn't help herself from squawking about how her account was overdrawn and how she needed an advance payment. This week, she announced her family was off to holiday. How much, I thought, her roller-coaster resembled my own, when I had been undecided.
But one year, I decided not to worry for a year: the question is, and is always, do we want to roll about in our misery? Or do we prefer to stand up, like a 'man?
Difficulty, never at peace, whirls around and seeks out one's address (and who knows the insidious ways in which it is procured) and huffs and puffs like in a child's tale. Tales inhabited by creatures as well as people, because, for example, to be too dogged is to be the dog.

After I watched Dinner with Andre, I wandered through other youtube links to find Q&A sessions with a yogi who I have not read up on. One video was entitled, "Why Do Desires Go Unfulfilled After Working So Hard?" One illustration the yogi gave in his answer was of a man who fell into a septic tank. Up to his shoulders in filth, he began to cry for help, but everyone said, oh, it's that fool again. So, he cried out, "Fire, fire!" but when the fire crew came, they saw there was no fire and asked indignantly who had called them. "Lower your ladder," the filthy man cried, so they did, and when they reprimanded him for calling them when there was no fire, he replied, "But if I hadn't, you wouldn't have come, to help me out," a message the yogi said demonstrated knowing the right thing to do.
But I think that sometimes the right thing to do is accepting, acceptance of oneself, and also not expecting a tit-for-tat relationship with the universe. Meaning that if one works so hard, one isn't to expect immediately visible results. In other words, I think that the question of that lecture is problematic.
This post contains a paradox. Of the attempt toward honesty, and an attempt to speak, but of the admission that silence is sometimes the best medicine. By silence, I also mean, just letting things be, letting the tension of the unresolved play its strange song. The uninvited guests will eventually leave when they see they are not being entertained: when they see they cannot entertain themselves by provoking their host.

Brush. Magazine.

Making Home

Economy should mean the upkeep of the household - οἰκονομία, household management. This is why I was quite intrigued by a post on Apartment Therapy by a certain DianneS.: "I'm interested in the angle of homemaking as an act of rebellion ...The quiet rebellion ... was the act of individuals who chose their own experience and histories over the government's insistence that there nothing of value existed before the Revolution. 

"So how does the concept of rebellious homemaking play now in this era, scattered as we are among so many disparate but joined cultures? ... I think homemaking is practically perfect as a statement for modern rebellion against a whole host of imposed constraints."

Many times I think about how if there is no one to "make" the home, the places where we live are but abodes - not homes. I would be intrigued by such things, having lived in over twenty places on several continents in under four decades. 

          The things that can never come back, are several -

          Childhood - some forms of Hope - the Dead -

          Though Joys - like Men - may sometimes make a Journey -

          And still abide...

This is a fragment of an Emily Dickinson poem, written on the back of a coconut cake recipe. Our recluse Dickinson sent food to her neighbours - and like Rapunzel, let down, not her hair, but basketfulls of bounty. 

Such are the gestures of the home, at least in my mind, but then, I do tend to abstractions and daydreams more than is my due. This evening, I found a recipe for Emily Dickinson's Coconut Cake, and made it with the following ingredients (adapted from the recipe at the link): 1 cup whole grain flour; 1 cup white flour; 1.5 tsp baking powder; 1 cup brown sugar; a bit of vanilla sugar; 0.25 cup butter, 0.25 cup virgin coconut oil; 2 eggs; a tad over 0.5 cup milk; 1 cup coconut "flour" with enough fruit tea to make it moist. What a success.

I was thrilled by allowing my ingredient constraints and tastes to alter a recipe once used by an author who kept me company when I was a child. I felt that in some small way, I was entering history in a way I doubt my writing ever will. Cooking is an act - so much more literal, direct than writing... For, to my mind, the whole point of writing was to make a home for myself where circumstantial constraints disallowed one.

We can make a journey and still abide, but to my imagination, the home is far superior. Yet since I have never really had one, this is but conjecture. 

Watercolour dots. Bread suspended over image from Marie Claire Idees.

Much Love Monday

For today's Much Love Monday, I love the world in colour. And when I write that, I am thinking about the English etymology of world, which is connected both to man and to abode. So, to think of the world in colour is to think of man in his many shades, and where he lives, how he lives...
Spring's gentle breeze and longer sunny arms have transformed my flat into a beautiful place to be. The other day, I was playing around with a Kinder Egg toy that has a magnifying glass, and looking, for fun, at old issues of my Marie Claire magazines, when I realised I could use both in a MLM photo montage. There is something to be said of looking at pictures of places in magazines - it's like going to Musée de l'Homme; one sees not only a room, but how it is set up for life. But not all photos of rooms inspire me in this anthropological ways.
Marie Claire Maison used to be my favourite magazine, but a few years ago, I stopped being able to connect the photos with narratives of lived lives. The substitute I found to share with you today is an online version of this fun: An Indian Summer (via). If you visit, why not play this perfectly springy Jane Birkin soundtrack, which comes recommended by An Indian Summer's curator.
What I like about the selection of photos is that most of the blog posts contain photos with ideas that could be applied in any home: a tonne of pillow cases made from French tea towels, for instance, or different ways to feed the inner child through colour (this and this are my favourite examples).

When I saw those examples of colour use, I suddenly remembered the Mughal illuminations I used to admire at the MET (like this). I thought about my love of colour. Though I have white walls, it suddenly occurred to me that my flat is full of colour, from the carpeting and furniture, to the multicoloured books, pictures and bunting. I thought about how I have always felt a chasm between the cartoonish child-like aspects of self and the demands of professionalism. But, looking through AIS, I remembered colourful folk elements, which one can see even in my flat, and began to think of how precisely through such arts and crafts, one can keep alive the child and the sophistication of the adult.
The post that spoke most to me in this respect is Global Chic, which featured a Norwegian blog's collection of photos of global corners from readers' rooms and homes.
This is an aesthetic I can stand behind. I have already written about my childhood home, and my affinity for universal unity. In the latter post, I quoted Rabindranath Tagore, who wrote of bringing forth that glad acceptance which constantly carries in itself the giving out of the best that we have. But I still feel that the best that we have may require, in some cultures, a conscious effort to preserve older roots of what the culture is. While culture is rather complicated, especially as mankind keeps moving, I believe that we can talk of "cultures". My ideal vision of a "world in colour" is where everyone exchanges the glimpse of the world they have. We do not all have to be the same, so in this ideal picture, there is no power play, but a teaching of each other so we can remember those beautiful parts of our humanity that we want to keep alive, to pass down to other generations.

Elements: Animus.

tutoring

So few students came to class today that it was almost like giving private lessons. People here are beginning to prepare for Easter. The farmer's market, already awash in the technicolour of neon salmon and deep green kale, is cluttered further by improvised tables, appearing wherever there is space, covered in egg dyes and stickers. Which is to say that the atmosphere is quite special, nothing commercial, rather, everyone seems to be at home or preparing for home.
Which brings me back to the miniature classes I taught today. One of my students said afterwards how happy she was she had come, since I could clarify her individual concerns. And I started to think about the bygone tutor, and about how learning is to be "passed down" as described by the epigram to one of J.C. Maxwell's books: λαμπάδια ἔχοντες διαδώσουσιν ἀλλήλοις ἁμιλλώμενοι τοῖς ἵπποις. That passage, from Plato's Republic, reads: They will pay visits to the old home and receive visits from it, beget children and bring them up, and thus hand the torch of life on from one generation to another and perpetuate the service of God which our laws demand. (via)
Individual attention is needed if we are to learn something well, if but to instill patience and an awareness that there is as much truth as there is deception. There are myriad examples of where essence departs from appearance, such as "doing the right thing" with a wrong attitude. Even virtue can be a vice if it is taken to the extreme, even if it happens unwittingly. "I give to charity!", "I don't break any laws!" says Ms. Bunty, but then she goes off in her thoughts to loathe her ex-husband.
Doing the right thing is not easy. In that '80's hit movie The Breakfast Club, the dean laments to the janitor over how each generation is getting progressively worse, to which the janitor replies that they aren't: rather, it's the dean who has changed. I think that one of humanity's greatest challenges is to reel in self-righteous judgement.
Being an educator does not give one the right to impose one's teaching. This is partly why Confucius spoke of one student as "rotten wood" - one is not to get angry if a student does not take to learning, but rather leave the student be. One must know the capacity of the material one is working with.
There is something to be said of letting go, even in the midst of one's work. That is another thought that keeps coming back to me these days. There is no way to get it done if one wants to get all vigilant about all the tasks: such an approach makes work unnecessarily monstrous.
The best tutor, the "guardian" who "watches over" will strive towards being understanding if firm with the bare minimum. He or she may try to watch that the torch has been correctly received by the willing and capable student.
Such contact, such a handing down, is part of how I feel about Easter. Much of the meaning really only begins to take on its bright colours when one has been taught to see certain things, and in the joy of an intimate togetherness.

Elements: velvet corners: pugly pixel.

awe and progress

Over at Laudator Temporis Acti, a recent post declared: "For this feeling of wonder shows that you are a philosopher, since wonder is the only beginning of philosophy." Wonder - as a point of departure. Wonder, not pride. Wonder, not fantasy.
Ruskin writes: "The pride of physical science is indeed adverse, like every other pride, both to religion and truth; but the sincerity of science, so far from being hostile, is the path-maker among the mountains for the feet of those who publish peace." It is an interesting lens to measure by. How much wonder is contained within a given work?
Awe has been lost in the modern, jaded age, so chuffed to ponder the perverse. Ruskin writes that his age "seemed to love what was ugly" - which figures in, insidiously, to the Baudelaire-Burgess legacy. Surely wonder can't be held in the same breath as Conrad's oh, the horror!
Many, many thinkers blame the secularization of culture for this shift. By secularization, they also mean "consistent methodological principles," professionalization, rationalization and a shift in political economy that moved away from the household.
But while there are some wonderfully creative conversations about the economy - like those of Amartya Sen, I wonder about trying to promote a discussion of awe. One of my favourite such passages is by St. John Chrysostom: "We admire many things; the beauty of a portico, of paintings, of a youthful body. We also admire the vastness of the Ocean; fear will be added to this admiration if we perceive the abyss of the depth of the sea, and it is this fear-admiration which the Psalmist experiences in contemplating the vast and immense Ocean of God's wisdom." Gervase Mathew, in Byzantine Aesthetics, adds, "This is perhaps reminiscent of Longinus on the Sublime, 'that echo that leads to ecstasy'."

And to echo back to a more material concern, one of my college science professors would often bemoan the fact that starvation persists despite there being enough food and transportation to feed everyone. Ruskin wrote the same: claiming that later generations would hate his age despite all of the industrial advances, as it had not solved the problem of famine.
During childhood, mother would often list the number of countries the food on the table had come from (I grew up in a non-agricultural Asian metropolis, what can I say) - and this added a sense of awe to our thanksgiving. What about bringing awe back? And isn't it being brought back? People are traveling out to farms to see all the hard work that is done to grow the food we sometimes take for granted. There is a growing awe for the craftsman, often filmed in short videos, sent around the web.
Couldn't awe also heal our economy? We know οἰκονομία, or oikonomia, means "household, management" - well then, if we infuse awe into all that we partake of each day, wouldn't we "publish peace"?
That said, there is a great difference between the hope in progress that emerged in Victorian society, and the Aristotelian view of the same. In Aristotle's account of an ideal society, which he described by using literary tools he was critical of, he was trying to point out a way forwards while warning us not to take the ideal literally. I wrote about where I got that idea here.
The only time we can jump into the ideal is when we feel that awe that makes us humble, and hear "that echo that leads back to ecstasy" - a voice that is not our own. They are but moments, due to our imperfection - but they bolster us to try to prolong them within ourselves.

 Elements: needlework - minitoko; hand figure - graphics fairy.

Collect words, not tchotchkes

In a Homeric sense, to speak is to pick out, choose, gather, collect, enumerate. So, of the words I shall now gather here, should they be the little branches to kindle a warming fire around the heart, or words that snap and crackle?
If I am going to gather and collect, I would prefer a collection of thoughts and values to a physical collection that I could display, regardless of how thoughtfully or adventurously obtained. It is interesting to consider what we collect during our lives, especially since what is collected must be put somewhere.
In Western cultures, people are generally given to collections, which are often stored in large edifices. But some cultures consist of more sheep than buildings, and are cozily diminutive.
The latter would hardly attract an ambitious, worldly person - because ambition, today, is expansive and looks to envelope cultural products and house them in ever-growing spaces. The space has surpassed the hearth, and contains rooms for eating, rooms for sitting and watching TV, and 'spare rooms'. From the perspective of such expanses, what is "cozy" is primitive, and too close for comfort. Never mind that the little house is a sign of our humanity: exposed to the elements, accommodating others' disparate, intimate habits.
The little house is a source of stories. As it can only provide the bare minimum, the inhabitants are often in need. Which ain't so bad: after all, necessity is the mother of invention.
Diogenes reduced his needs to the bare minimum, living in a barrel. He understood how easily we over- complicate matters. For example, most cooking shows elevate food to beyond the level of serving the purpose of nourishment. Excess is not the mother of invention, but complication. Similarly, modern cars take away the experience of driving: there is no motor sound, no effort involved in rolling down the windows. This is excess in transporation - the emphasis is on having arrived, and not the journey. It deprives us of the bumps in the road that let us know we are driving. To deny process is to complicate matters by hiding the method to success. Also, "comfort" that denies "cozy" blinds us to who we are: little, fragile creatures.
We can see our flawed nature in the Persian rugs, with their planned imperfections. We all know there is another way, like wabi sabi, whereby we should leave well enough alone when gardening, and let the trees we've caringly planted have their own way, too. If only we were to understand that the heavens bend to us and our perspective when we are not acting big. Just like in a Bruegel pastoral, the expanse is great, but it is still commensurate to the varied, individual peasants.
I have collected here a small and simple house of words. Is it splendid enough for your taste?

Elements: lace brushes: Project Gimp BC; envelope: pugly pixel;

tape and envelope: Besotted Brand via Creature Comforts.