Rope Emblematic of Love

"For the sake of all your future life," we are told in Phaedo, we are not to assume that we ourselves are in sound condition but must strive to be so, otherwise we may risk losing the opportunity to learn something of the truth (90e).  In fact, we are given the illustration of the "haters of argument" or "misanthropists" who invest too much faith in arguments they know nothing about and when finding such false, repeatedly, end in continuous quarrels, hating everybody, and thinking there is nothing sound in anyone at all (88c-89e).
Some of us know it is a deceptive world, but this knowledge might not necessarily save us, particularly from ourselves.
Socrates argues, again and again in so many ways, for us to remain open to our lack of understanding.  But he shows in Phaedo, through an interesting illustration of opposites and things that are not opposites but can take on the value of opposites, how it is possible to maintain an untainted idea of ideals behind the mire and confusion of the concrete.
It might sound banal, but a personal example of confusion had to do with justification behind consideration of art if one is set on obtaining ideals.  I remembered Plato's Socratic warning against some lower forms of art in the Republic and was confused by my own yearnings.  But this is where Aristotle comes in: and chance encounters with students who read recently his On Poetry. Tragedy can serve a purpose, involving catharsis.
For the sake of all of our future life, are we not sometimes bogged down by particulars, though?  I thought recently after I tried to rush a short story for a competition how I "hate situations."  They are such knots.  But if you are from the East like me, the moment you think of knot, you remember it is one of the eight 吉祥八宝, or auspicious symbols.  It is 盤長結, the coil or mystic knot, and has to do with wisdom and compassion.  It can also have to do with wisdom and method; religion and secularism; the endless movement of mind and eternal love and friendship - and so much more, like ancestors and the living, emptiness and dependent co-arising.
About forerunners: it becomes clear in the Socratic dialogues taking place up to his death (namely in the two Apologies) that he had instructed youth to seek what is right (which may have been in conflict with parents and their wishes, if these were not also oriented in the same fashion).  This does not mean - as we see from Xenopohon's Memorabilia - that one should disrespect one's parents: this thread leads out of the knot that would restrain one from seeing the ideal.  The tragedy, out of compassion, begs one to see something of oneself, of the human experience and where we can go wrong, repeatedly.
For the sake of the future life, these days are not to be seen as the end.  Is there room in the imagination to see something even greater beyond that which can be touched by the senses?

To engage with beauty not as the final destination, but as a sign.
Because it can all get confusing, so quickly.  To take a few-day jaunt in a foreign land, one may so quickly forget the stoic principles one had laid in place in one's home.  All that is possible is suddenly present, physically.
I walk down a road with the sugar dust of Turkish delight smudging my blue dress and see one of those hungry looking youths who seems a ghost of Burroughs or Ginsberg and think of the dizzying qualities of the crossroads that never occurs to me when I am at home when I seek not adventure but training.  Suddenly I am not thinking about self-restraint, but all the reasons behind someone's stare, all the possibilities behind the emergence of this stranger: what is it looking for?
Not all opinions, but the truth.  This is what Socrates urges.  "Human wisdom is of little or no value," we learn in Plato's Apology.
Then, all those "experiences" that tantalise one with their nearness are forced to retreat into humility.  We are at the precipice.  The knot is the nearness of those friends who circumstance and/or affinity has brought close to us, whose problems we try to solve, mutually.
I visited a friend who lives in a shell; she is making pearls from salt.  I think she looks like a mermaid, and she even rolls her hair in torn bits of fabric.  She is so young and so old at the same time, and since I last saw her, she has made it on her own in a foreign land, a foreign city.  The sign of survival.  So many of the accoutrements fall away of their own accord.  We are bound to temporality but despite its turbulence and changes, the message of love remains the same: the hair of the favourite is petted in Phaedo, differences are talked out so long as an ideal is shared, otherwise even the knot untangles and falls apart.
Socrates says we ought to do our best to acquire virtue and wisdom because the prize is fair, and ought to repeat the merits of being righteous like a charm.  Part of this charm is self-restraint, which means not going just anywhere one could, doing just anything one could.  If eternity is the knot we are going for, a stillness of mind is asked for according to which important threads are to be gathered. 
But if the Phaedo teaches anything, it is that truth is not to be gained through angry argumentation, but through a gentle exploration wherein all earnest questions are permitted.  Just like in the endless knot, it is love that interpenetrates all: and love permits freedom.  Freedom for the sake of the future life.
For the meaning of the title, see དཔལ་བེའུ  (Sanskrit for 盤長結 coil knot) in  Sarat Chandra Das. Tibetan-English Dictionary with Sanskrit Synonyms (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Book Depot: 1902), pp.69, "the auspicious mark represented by a curled noose emblematical of love."
 

Brush: Ewansim Grunge at DeviantART.

Sources

I was driven through landscapes today that I could never have imagined. We joked that if we were to relate what we saw, no one would believe us. There was an entire village of intricately-tiled homes, some with ceramic statuary of eagles whose eager and open wings seemed to defy their static form that cemented them between series of otherwise pillared balcony balustrades. Other ornaments - where they indeed were found on this architecture, from the roofs or at strange distances from the entrance - included bucking horses and lions (not the open-mouthed fortuitous Chinese sort). The thing about these houses, though, was that every one of them had their blinds drawn shut: uninhabited. Entire villages of ornamented, freshly painted, but empty homes.
And from the meandering roads, always meandering and never straight, we drove into the desert. Several times we passed people walking from and to who knows where and why as any destination was clearly more than an hours' walk away from where we passed them at noon. In the middle of those sandy lands was a wooden sign inscribed in an antiquated script that read: SOURCE. It was posted near to the road, and pointed past the road in a direction that led to no path nor to any apparent destination. That is perhaps the best summary of these hills and a perfect definition of life as it may seem to the person sometimes.

Along those roads that I longed to walk away from, craving the smell of the earth and the peace and quiet of the journey à pied, were over three score goshawks adopting various poses: one, perched upon a lone wooden post; another, at the top of a tree; a third, burrowing in the black, black earth, etc. Which reminds me of the blackspot road sign we passed - we may as well have entered a black hole, everything familiar was left behind and we drove into more fog and the birds got bigger, the smaller ones probably knowing better than to fall prey to those difficult terrains.
The mind and the soul may be starved for the larger landscape and when finally allowed to gaze at pastures that extend to the horizon, it may suddenly etch those impressions not so much to hoard them as to replenish the empty rooms, so empty that any portrait might also be useful in the time to come.
If as adults we do not know that whatever obstructs, contorts, denies, too, shall pass, perhaps we have not done our growing and if we do know such things, it is wise to store up on whatever leads the imagination back to its sources.

This long journey made today, to the desert and back in a roundabout way, was medicine for all of the petty indeterminacy of the two-faced, which, we may remember, is the symbol for the dual tragic-comedic masks of Μελπομένη and Θάλεια - the Muses of sad song and joyous flourishing, who are the sisters to the Muses of epic poetry, history, lyrical poetry, erotic poetry, hymns, and astronomy. There was something said about how theatre (whose two-faced symbol may also have birthed Janus, the god of this month and who is usually depicted above doorways) derived from what was originally temple worship. There is something that may be said about how to consider sources (such as retreating from pettiness to the perspective of history) shields one from the fracturing of vision, where things divide and multiply, seemingly without end in a rather uninspiring and oppressive way.

Sir Arthur Helps writes about how the temptation to create drama out of life stems from an ill-informed tendency towards entertainment. I shall cite it almost in full because I know I myself will want to come back to these words from time to time: "people will backbite one another to any extent rather than not be amused. Nay, so strong is this desire for something to go on that may break the monotony of life, that people, not otherwise ill-natured, are pleased with the misfortune of their neighbours, solely because it gives something to think of, something to talk about. They imagine how the principal actors and sufferers concerned in the misfortune will  bear it; what they will do; how they will look: and so the dull bystander forms a sort of drama for himself. ... 
"These poor people have nothing to think about; nature shows them comparatively little, for art and science have not taught them to look behind the scenes, or even at the scenes; literature they know nothing of; they cannot have gossip about the men of the past (which is the most innocent kind of gossip), in other words, read and  discuss history; they have no delicate handiwork to amuse them ; in short, talk they must, and talk they will, about their neighbours, whose goings-on are a perpetual puppet-show to them."
It may be the Janus of January that brings the two-faced into prominence: one may prefer indeed to think of it hung upon the door as a sign. If one has grown at all, one shall not take things at their surface value. The journey to the desert may remind one of those larger expanses, beyond the houses of nature in cement, beyond the petty collectivity that man sometimes imposes on the land,  out of tune.

Brush.

Words from Fennel

It has been a holiday season of spices, I even perused the market looking for a better mortar and pestle; among the brass handiwork was a stall of postcards, some from the 1920's, carefully arranged beneath a magnificent cigar box, causing me to wonder at the vendor. Those travellers' words, in such neat little stacks at such an inconspicuous stall, for whom?
I remember long ago seeking out the shell of a 19th century spice store in Ravenna; there it was, it, Dante's grave, and the flooded church crypt, the Basilica di San Francesco, tied together in my imagination, for it was the waters that brought the spices across such long distances, navigated by the pattern of the Galla Placidian sky. Who would not also think, in connection with sea and the trading of spices, also of Elizabeth I, the gathering together of aromas like so many tesserae.
I have been making masala chai and harissa, as if these spices could calm the sea in the bones. I think back to Gloriana's explorers, looking for passages around continents in all that darkness of the unknown. Perhaps there is no need for the symbol of our shared horizon when, as Rebecca West once wrote, today the laziest person has but to recline into the already established grooves of transport. Other types of travellers, though, may take the line of Io in Prometheus Bound: "My far-roaming wanderings have taught me enough." (PB575)
She, as Prometheus, is εσμώτης - chained, fettered, considering herself to be bound to misery. In fact the play could be seen as commentary on how man's dreams and imagined futures blind him to the present and bodily restraint: the characters are bound despite their machinations. The Chorus says to Prometheus: "Sweet it is to pass all the length of life amid confident hopes, feeding the heart in glad festivities. But I shudder [540] as I look on you, racked by infinite tortures. ... Did you not see the helpless infirmity, no better than a dream, in which the blind [550] generation of men is shackled?" They reprimand him for his lack of humility - and he, he is not allowed to die, having transgressed normal bodily constraint (PB742).
Io's misery, too, was beset by visions, dreams, and aggravated by the oracle: ἧκον δ᾽ ἀναγγέλλοντες αἰολοστόμους χρησμοὺς ἀσήμους δυσκρίτως τ᾽ εἰρημένους (661-2) "oracles, riddling, obscure, darkly worded" (literally: an oracle that is unintelligible, hard to interpret, shifting in words).
The answer of an oracle, χρησμός, is related to the proclamation of the gods in the oracle, χράω, a word with many other meanings, including to furnish to the senses. Gadamer writes that the oracle proclaims a multiplicity of meanings to be interpreted (RB69). As opposed to this is the emphasis on speech that is truthful and telling plainly in simple language without riddles (PB640,609).

But even a μῦθος is a saying: a saying that possesses reality only through its being said (RB70). We are also wont to remember the opening to the Theogony: the Muses tell as much truth as they do lies.
Io is seeking the truth. Alone, she "cannot discern how to escape" her sufferings (PB575). She begs Prometheus to tell him her future but he declines, not wanting to crush her spirit. (PB609) So she implores him again after telling her tale and revealing how much of it was riddled (see above). "Do not, from pity, seek [685] to soothe me with untrue words; for I consider false words to be the foulest sickness." The Chorus replies: "never, did I dream that words so strange would greet my ears; [690] or that sufferings so grievous to look upon, yes, and so grievous to endure, a tale of outrage, would strike my soul". (PB697)
It is at this point (PB 696) that Prometheus begins to talk like a guidebook. But as he talks, he does not tell the simple truth Io wishes to hear, but a "prophecy," that is "not easy to understand" - i.e., οὐκέτ᾽ εὐξύμβλητος ἡ χρησμῳδία (literally: no longer easy to divine/a good omen [is your] answer of an oracle). He calls his words "tales" λόγοιν. He then continues to speak in riddles, offering her an account that may be hers or that of his deliverer.
Gadamer writes that something may be intimated but not intended. "Interpretation seems to be a genuine determination of existence rather than an activity or an intention ... The meaning of the oracle in this sort of tragedy lies in the fact that the hero provides an exemplary illustration of the ambiguities of fate that hang over ever one of us. As human beings, we are essentially caught up in the attempt to interpret the meaning of this ambiguity." (RB71)
Io cries that she has learned enough from her travels, and wishes for them to end. But such was not her fate, caught between the simple speech she longs for and the words of others. Perhaps a life is made up of as many such tesserae: some of our own making, and some of context.
But what of the spices, you ask? Maybe you know. Prometheus used a stalk from a fennel plant to steal fire from the gods. Fennel is used in 五香粉 which came to the West via the diaspora. There are many sorts of travellers, not all just following grooves. Perhaps the danger is not in the travelling but the will of the traveller. As the Chorus says, may Zeus' power never be set in conflict with one's will (PB 526). If one could but go with the flow, or live as the guest-friend.

Magazine. Font: Deftone Stylus.

Every Hole Evolves a Whole

Sometimes when I think about "home" it becomes the negative concept of where I am not. But I know that even if I were to go to where a certain part of me could be met, there would be other things missing. Kristeva compares foreigners to Io, who was pursued by the οἶστρος - a gadfly, but also a word used by Plato to denote irrational drives, the "gadfly of desire" - sending her across many seas. Even though Io returns to a normal life of motherhood in Egypt, if one has travelled, surely one has the opportunity to look for better stories to provide schemes for understanding.
Except that by bringing something out of its context through comparison, one risks changing a story's essence. This can happen once one has chosen to objectify something - the way of looking that makes an idea foreign by setting it apart from the familiarity of cohabitation. Hadot writes how objectification of prefabricated phrases decontextualises them, now misinterpreted and mistranslated. Yet some ideas built out of misunderstanding, "have brought about important evolutions."
The traveller wishing to be systematic about all the stories he or she collects realises what Hadot writes, that the actual progress of thought functions rationally outside the bounds of mathematical thought or Hegelian dialectics. One becomes like Lévi-Strauss. One also comes to realise the large gap between the artistic freedom of making something new and the learned respect for the sometimes elusive meaning of the original context. Hadot explains that we cannot be sure of the original meaning of γνῶθι σεαυτόν, know thyself. It is possible to wander the earth like a disinherited maiden, making a patchwork quilt of deracinated maxims. This is our home, we may say, as we put the quilt into the dowry box which indeed follows us to that next home, wherever it may be.
Thence the notion of atopia - which we next find in Hadot's "Forms of Life and Forms of Discourse." Here, atopia refers to the strangeness of the philosopher in the human world. "For such a man, daily life, as it is organised and lived by other men, must appear abnormal, like a state of madness, unconsciousness, and ignorance of reality. And nonetheless he must live this life every day, in this world in which he feels himself a stranger and in which others perceive him to be one as well. And it is precisely in this daily life that he must seek to attain that way of life which is utterly foreign to the everyday world. The result is a perpetual conflict between ... the life one should live and the customs and conventions of daily life."
There are many forms of homelessness.

And if I return to stories of travelling, instead of looking to Hermes, troublesome in that he is honoured by thieves, I will think of 孙悟空 who is himself possibly a retelling - a story taken from its context, of Hanuman from the Ramayama. He is Sun Wukong, the monkey king, who gains supernatural powers from practicing the Tao. I choose 孙悟空 because he makes a Journey to the West, accompanying a Buddhist monk to retrieve the wisdom of the sutras. His travels are based on service, and the goal of the travels is knowledge that sets us free, not material wealth.
As Hadot says: we are wont to privilege who we are over what we have. What we have is also a place. But some people hide behind the conventions of the place, never rising above it to the courage to be a friend to those who may be passing through, i.e. those who feel their transience.
Who are we? I find that a very difficult question, on par with the question I am often asked, "Why do you live here?"
So I will answer in story, and take liberties like in Lee-Hom Wang's music video 伯牙絕弦 which takes its theme from the tale of BoYa and incorporates elements of Chinese calligraphy, reminding me of the hours I would play alone imagining that art as my childhood friends were learning it. What I remember about it were the very strict and subtle rules - only the trained eye could recognise the characteristics of superior calligraphy. Knowing those rules, it was surprising to me to see calligraphy appear as it does in the video. I was also surprised at how fusion in the video is a beat that is primarily Western. Why.
My story then is a Journey to the East, I don't have 孙悟空, a monkey companion - but like Sun Wukong, I have a character who is "awakened to emptiness." I could also do without his violence. In my story, the protagonists are also travelling for spiritual wisdom. Why spiritual? Because - and here I will borrow from Hadot, the words "'psychic,' 'moral,' 'ethical,' 'intellectual,' 'of thought,' 'of the soul' - cover all the aspects of reality we want to describe." Those words do "not indicate clearly enough the imagination and sensibility play a very important role ... although intellectual factors as definition, division .. reading, investigations, and ehtorical amplification play a large role ... [as do] ... therapeutics of the passions". 'Spiritual' indicates not merely thought "but the individual's entire psychism."

My story in progress is about bringing the whole world into oneself, through sympathy, because to only see part of the world or be in part of the world is bound to make one feel empty. As Gadamer has written, even if one has experienced a new culture and context fully through hermeneutics, and assimilates it to the point of privileging it, one can never forget one's first context.
We can remember Bakhtin: hybrids emerge. Must we, even if we wish so much to respect original context, fear the hybrid? Surely, in the final analysis, there has always been much idea exchange - and then periods of assimilation and formation of tradition. When I think of "tradition" I think of Chinese calligraphy and African masks in the sense that both have very strict rules, and any innovation must be within those guidelines, never complete transformation.
I would argue that to reach such subtle lines of definition of what something "is" represents some form of transcendence. Finesse. I do not see refinement in much of the quotidian, which is not to say that it is not there, just that it is today often beneath the surface.
A holistic globe would allow for such subtleties and yet allow for the "dance of meeting from form to form" that Davenport writes of, his example being the iconographic shift of a Macedonian coin depicting the head of Hermes on one side and a winged horse on the other, morphing, from copy to copy, into the Celtic coin that forms the image on the cover of his collection of essays Every Force Evolves a Form.
Just as much as I feel tension in never quite belonging in any single place, I feel tension in my very strong penchant for the uniform (even literally) and tradition where it is most clear cut. The formula I have found to allow for free, spontaneous creative play and respect for tradition is through the hermeneutic experience which looks to first listen to the tradition and then, once one has been informed by it, look to where it relates to the present moment. One is to try very hard not to misunderstand. But this ultimately depends on whether our own experience has made us ready to receive the new information.
So in the final count, it is a problem of audiences and the "impossibility of the general audience" (Hadot). We have not always been made empty enough to hold the fullness that is life. We are sometimes impatient to understand things that we have not made ourselves worthy of, or have not completed the appropriate prerequisites to properly access.

Watercolour brush. Magazine.

Sea, Maestro

There is a recording of one of Tiegerman's performances of Chopin buried in an article about the search for master concert pianists that led the author to Cairo, and the curious maze of personalities that cluster around the 'other' often visible in the art of overseas. It is about a master with the draw of the sea.
How close we have come to a certain kind of person may make all the difference in our lives. The Greek ἐπίσταμαι refers to both knowing and standing upon - there seems, on so many levels, to be a topical aspect to learning. The place of the books. The professor's office. To stand in the same room as luminaries. Something rubs off in the contact, if not always enough. 
When I listened to the Tiegerman Chopin recording certain kinds of friends came to mind: with their signature deftness that came from neat lessons unfettered with the indeterminacy of what Gadamer calls untenable hermeneutic nihilism (when relativity, not man, reigns - man, who is to be magis, or "more" than his surroundings). That is the sign of the master, a 'greater-than' sign.
So let us return to Cairo and the article. We learn there was a time when people of all backgrounds got along; that two Muslims sat by the side of their infirm Jewish friend's bed to the very end. Edward Said, cited in the article, himself writes about this in Reflections on Exile. He describes one of Tiegerman's most promising students, a Muslim mother of four, veiled always in her burda, who never said a word in his presence: nonetheless, he points out that in Cairo, the ultra-European and ultra-Islamic conjugated, "Where such pictures have since gone I don't know, but part of their poignancy for me is that I am certain they will never recur."
But are such crossroads not also the sign of the master, magis to landmarks? Gadamer writes that something is overcome in aesthetics, if ultimately within the structure of meaning: "Our experience of the aesthetic is a mode of self-understanding. Self-understanding always occurs through understanding something other than the self and includes the unity and integrity of the other." Emphasis added.
In Said's Reflections, he writes that Tiegerman continued to live in Cairo even when things got harder because there, he felt unique, while in Israel, many were like him. But surely he meant that he had found the circle of people to whom he was relevant. One does not pick where this happens. Knowledge is also a place with its own reasons, not always apparent to us.
But if Gadamer is right about aesthetics and the other, then it would make sense if, as Said writes, many once went to Cairo for "warmth and possibilities in contrast to what was coming in Europe". Merely to stand there would be aesthetic. Something more, and meaningful.

Brush. Magazine.

Not All Audiences

There can be such a longing for a talisman from the past or from one of its many-suitcased 'homes' now too far gone - a half tessera - to show that one belongs to other contexts outside of where one finds oneself, to ward off the occasional small-mindedness that takes years and years of practice to laugh off. There can be such a longing to have an audience with distance.
I wonder if perhaps the talisman is only gained through time; maybe it is the shape one grows into, against so many tides. To become one's own symbol. And who in the world would care if one succeeds in this? It is so counter to the mainstream that it may seem without significance. Except there is Gauguin's Noa Noa, there is also the matter of unfinished business. We might not choose our beginnings, but perhaps we each bear an enigma that can either be ignored, or pursued (I write not of the bland).
Noa Noa is a book of a journey, a recounting of the myths of yesteryear, an East meets West narrative (Tahitians "less pale" than Gauguin), personal discovery, the accommodation afforded by the locals, nature reached through symbols, and at the end, a going home. Gauguin goes home. At the cost of someone else's tears.
To be accommodated, sometimes one must travel very far away, indeed. It depends on the type of roots one was born in to and the generosity one is surrounded by. But the dimension of accommodation that is haunting me is that a locality - as a whole - is a smaller mind than the cosmopolite, a word which contains the words cosmos, world, politês - citizen. One does not want to be at the hands of the smaller judge.
Gauguin's words may be better understood at 'home', though it was not his 'native home' that had brought him into himself. The West has swallowed up so many narratives, they can live in its colonial languages. This may be, in part, why to write in them - like Tagore or Yeats - is to be scorned by one's countrymen. But such writers, like the koiné, Roman cults of assimilation, and Akbar's dynasty, were all sponges.

The sponge, which is taken as a model to be imitated, is interestingly the simplest animal on the planet. They basically have a lot of pores, and as water filters through them, they extract what they need. So perhaps its key here is circulation - a worldly symbol.
It stands for κοινός; that which is shared, common, public. But as Heraclitus famously observed, not all people can register this shared experience, because they are living as if they were asleep (95: ὁ Ἡράκλειτός φησι τοῖς ἐγρηγορόσιν ἕνα καὶ κοινὸν κόσμον εἶναι τῶν δὲ κοιμωμένων ἕκαστον εἰς ἴδιον ἀποστρέφεσθαι).
The ideal audience brings more than one context to circumstance (of a conversation, in looking at art, etc), eager for there to be good fruit behind the screen of words. Just as there is conversation, the terms in the conversation can be open to different levels of meaning. So the ideal circumstance may be most like the sponge: with the most pores to catch fecund meaning. It should have the most arrows, pointing to the most healing of exits and horizons.
Heraclitus is one who "went out in search of" himself. He saw beyond the limited horizons of his society. His words have various levels of meaning - and for all these reasons, who is the right audience for his works? While anyone with a computer today can read his fragments, will one necessarily understand them?
Comprehension may lay, in part, in the French painter's rejection of security, complacency. Only if one has given something up: one's home, a piece of darker past, something taken by sacrifice, do the eyes see. And even if one has not done this, if one listens, through the koiné, one is bound to learn of such things, through empathy. Experience is saved through listening, which opens up what Merton called "the flowering of ordinary possibilities".
The audience, and talisman, I seek is of those flowers. There is a risk that as one forms oneself in the craft that the naysayers will cut one down before one has found one's voice (to be distinguished from buzz, and the illusion of having one's say). Also, the more one has to say, the more one can get it wrong. The more there is to say, the stronger the impulse to make a connection with words and people.
Quality takes time, even if quality is garnering the audience one seeks. "Let us not be like those who wish to make the tree bear its fruit first and the flower afterward - a conjuring trick and an advertisement. We are content if the flower comes first and the fruit afterward, in due time. Such in the poetic spirit. Let us obey life ... that calls us to be poets, and we shall harvest many new fruits for which the world hungers - fruits of hope that have never been seen before."
"No one can come near the river unless he walks on his own feet. He cannot come there carried in a vehicle." This is the audience that sees seeds where there are words.

Nail polish element. Book in background.

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.

One Degree

It only takes a difference of 1C in temperature to determine whether or not coral will thrive. I would take that as a measure of sensitivity in the human soul.
In the NYT excerpt of Moss' new book, we learn that some do not "have the luxury to be moral". It's a difference of one degree centigrade. In an age when the finer things are commonly taught as not being worth money and as being irrelevant, little parts of the earth that we only discovered yesterday, like through Cousteau's exploration, are already being lost - being blasted from view (as described by this video, which I could not watch to the end).
The word I am dwelling on is fragile. In one degree, it is the difference between waking up already harried and waking up marvelling at the miracle of the new day (here's a video on the new sun and the Inuit). To feel awe at a new day informs one's actions and thoughts - but such subtlety often goes unmeasured.
And we are happy to measure the taste of wine: as I was, particularly as a child; I remember the cold caves and developing vocabulaire de l'oenologie. Those notes and textures were connected to geography, the terre, the personality of the vineyard: there was something sacral to that context, so the wine, to my mind, never became a product to be consumed, but something to be held with awe. Perhaps because of the stern eyes of the patrons as I swooshed before tasting.
I associate taste with the hard work of origins. It is an ethical category in my imagination. And as for degrees: food, if it is respected, will either bear the category of the right amount of heat, or the right amount of time - I have swopped the former for the latter, and make stews.
It was my father who took me to the vineyards, and my father who decided we would eat like the locals. My favourite meals are so far away from me now, for their ingredients: winter melon and barley soup, mango chicken... That food is a song, associated with the cooks and other memories, like the amah secretly bringing me spicy tamarind candies. The bitter sweet time.
And suddenly I find these sacred ties have been slashed. When I watch those videos (above), I remember my own experience with boat people, and I cannot watch without understanding their desperation. The word "education" which ostensibly offers new modes of survival, takes on a sinister hue. Already when I was a child, when we visited the hill tribes, they were beginning to leave for the cities: though those remaining had never seen fair hair before our visit. You might want to ask me why I care about the "marginal", which doesn't make the laws. But in my imagination, that is where the one degree of life is most visible. That one degree that determines so much.

Element. Though the flowers have bloomed, the branches turned to ice. Photograph courtesy of R.J.

Birds Don't Belong in Cages

I was going through my dwindling card collection this morning to send to the longer living member of a couple who was central to my upbringing. I had bought the cards at a handicraft store raising money for charity foundations in the city where I grew up: the title comes from an Asian ornithologists' society. The title was relevant, but the birds and calligraphy on the card not, so I passed it over for an Orthodox icon of the Mother of God, because every time I looked at it, I thought of the woman I was writing to.
My life has not moved in a straight line. There was a time I was somewhat shipwrecked, and I called this couple, who hosted me one night; I remember her taking me to brunch in the morning, and talking so reasonably to me about life and what it is we need to do, even when the odds are stacked against us, even when it looks like we lack the necessary strength.
He looked gruff, but was a Steiff, my mother used to say. When I showed him my poems, he scoffed and wrote two lines of Pushkin on the Recreation Club napkin, saying, "This is poetry." I cannot find that poem at the moment, but the line was something to do with a young woman and her eye, underlined. He allowed me to interview him to get my first byline; anyone could get a Pulitzer by asking him questions.
So when I saw "Birds don't belong in cages" this morning, I thought of him. He was quite the general towards the end, never complaining. Talk of good wine and cigarettes would bring a glint to his eye. "It was good to see him smile especially over that last glass of wine." I thought of the uncaged bird and Szymborska's "Prefereces" (via): "I prefer not to ask how much longer and when. I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility that existence has its own reason for being."
As if to just be in life is a way to stay open - empty for awe to fill the spaces. "They who preserve this method of Tao do not wish to be full (of themselves). It is through their not being full of themselves that they can afford to seem worn and not appear new and complete." (15) Today, people seem to want to appear free of vices - which are often not even vices. To be the oenologist is to appreciate life, not caging it into seems or rigidity. Do we properly appreciate the things we may partake of in life, things naysayers criticise as being superfluous? It is a special kind of work to recognise the nuances of that which we appreciate: it requires learning, internalising, the nuances.
But maybe we are tempted by cages at some point in our life because we wish to contain that which we appreciate - though to siphon off experience in a concerted way can destroy it. Being is to receive, not control. "I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order," Szymborska writes.
And if we have got the hang of being, hopefully we have around us people who love us, who knit over our own weaknesses, and showcase the beautiful aspects of ourselves that are worth remembering. This would be a successful tapestry of life, which I have had, and have, the honour of witnessing in one couple.

Element.

Scarf being knit from this Purl Bee pattern.

Ken and Other Roots

When we know (ken) something, we can name it. In my experience, though, sometimes we misname things we think we know, like in Victorian cartography's fanciful, domineering names.
When I think I understand my native culture; my adolescent cultures; the culture where I live now, I am often seeing my own vision of "inroads into humanity". If one looks hard enough into any culture, one can see all kinds of tenets and traditions: mystics regarded with awe or suspicion; poseurs - even if they are African, seeking Picasso's fictive Africa; liars and saints, corruption and charity.
It is possible to be more of a Romantic than an anthropologist. I, for one, relate to Rilke's pilgrimage to Russia with Andreas-Salome, how the Russia they found was scorned by some natives... How Rilke later saw icons in things, including Rodin's sculptures. It was a way of looking he found, as much as a place. It is possible that 'certain ways of looking' are revered more in some places than in others. Sandburg criticised American culture when it preferred poetry with footnotes to his poems of folk wisdom. Goethe and the brothers Grimm critiqued cerebral German poetry and sought out that same folk. I seek that folk. But the folk exist everywhere, anonymous until heard.
We, the folk, are not static. And unless tradition has been torched like in the attempt by the Futurists, it probably exists somewhere, making gradual, if camouflaging, adjustments to the ever-changing part of life subsumed by history.
Hybrids emerge. Culture is slippery. What isn't so slippery - but still enigmatic, are the universal aspects of humanity. These can be invisible: connected not to what we do, but how we are doing it: Out of love? To destroy? Or do we proceed with awe, respect?
I would guess that what is "folk" - the building blocks of a society - can be rediscovered, if it is lost, through in-listening. The fact that there are proverbs that exist across cultures could be proof of a common sense. Which calls to mind Rodin's primeval Cathedral, with the coming together of two right hands; shelter emerging out of nothing. Reminiscent of Sandburg's Arches, "unbreakable arches" - the love among men, the covenant of God. The in-listening says: if there is to be birth, the pain of labour, there must be a good reason. Also, we are all in this together. This is simple to know, but so often misnamed - except by folk who say: "A worry shared is a worry halved."
Dualities (like different cultures, or the contradictions in a personality) can remain themselves and still be brought into creative, critical harmony. To stuff oneself - or anything made by humans - into one single box is to be lost; unknown; unable. But our knowledge is supposed to set us, and our dog and chicken, free!*

Lace brush.

* 一人得道,雞犬皆升

To Convey A Sense For Life: On Montaigne

I was thinking this morning about what Davenport writes about Montaigne: "His mind was speculative in the manner of the Hellenistic age: eclectic in philosophy, skeptical in religion, Stoic in the conduct of life... The account of a journey by a wide-awake traveller rarely fails to make good reading. In his ability to convey sense of place with a few deft details (a topiary garden, an historical site, local anecdotes... [Montaigne's] eye is practical, curious, ironic." To my mind all of the above is characteristic of the French, who, incidentally, are marvelous travellers. Yes, beware the generalisation, but allow me to illustrate.
Where I grew up in Asia, there was a strong French presence: seen down to the most prosaic of details: thanks to the proliferation of Delifrances, everyone knew the variety of French pastries. At the same time, so many French people I met had a learned understanding of Buddhism and local lore: yet, they would always ask additional questions of the locals. And what of the French religious view? Hellenistic, skeptical, Stoic in terms of a kind of fortitude. (Hellenistic - you have only to go to the Benaki Museum to see Lyonnaise mothers taking their children on tours of the pieces - without guidebook in hand.)
And as for religion... it is a shame that the West distorts its own religions such (I am not even talking about faith here, but just the "entry level"). The religious tenet which has remained unhampered is deeply buried in Hellenistic thought: the secret of scholars who know that philosophy was meant to be practiced, like religion is practiced. (It is a secret, because today, when we say "philosophy" we have the terrible nightmares of Nietzsche and Hegelian extremes to contend with.) Montaigne, in his Essais, sums up this aspect of philosophy best when he writes: To Study Philosophy Is To Learn To Die.

I prefer to say very little about the deeper aspects of religion especially since I agree with J.C. Maxwell that these matters are intensely private. But I see something being lost from our cultural vocabulary, that is appropriated in unexpected places. Like the unexpected outgrowths of rhetoric: we do not teach it for it to be learned, but it is used magically against us in advertising. I have written before about the importance of first learning communication, before learning "facts". Another example of modern rhetoric is televangelism. But what of the Hellenistic skepticism that used to accompany rhetoric? He is to go "about with the caution of sick or injured people..." There are some intelligent uses of rhetoric in the film Leap of Faith, where Steve Martin ultimately admits his limits as preacher in the scene about "the genuine article". 

Montaigne writes: "'tis a common vice ... almost of all men, to walk in the beaten road their ancestors have trod before them." To say it is a vice requires qualification: for the beaten road also includes rhetoric, which he liberally makes use of. What is ancient isn't necessarily retrograde, as testified by the book on the phrase: phusis kruptesthai philei - or the freshness of an engaging mind.

 

Asian postmark brush.

magical realism

This morning, I awoke to silence. Perhaps some of the city finally scrounged together enough money to go on holiday. Or perhaps the city is silent because last night, the wind came. I can hear it thumbing through the leaves of the trees as I write. And what relief.
They say that our land turned into Africa in recent weeks, that the meteorological conditions were closest to those of that parched land. In the past, anyway, sometime around the end of summer, a thin layer of sand would blow in from Africa, gently covering cars with a fine, almost invisible, layer of African sand.
Writers cite this country as a source of inspiration for magical realism, which occurs daily. A woman in a sundress with neon-yellow sunflowers enters a cage at the zoo, to pet a lion. In the middle of the day. In the middle of the cage of untamed beasts. The explanation? The woman had taken that very cub in to her home, to feed it during the dire times that had befallen this city. So one does not have to be a poet to be a poet here; it is enough to live here and to look around.
If you go to that zoo, you will often walk among the peacocks, because they let them out of their cages frequently enough. Sometimes it is enough to walk next to the zoo to see the peacocks in the trees, just sitting there, keeping their strange vigilance over the city streets below.
This city has more historical landmarks than any other in the region, but you will not see them displayed, you cannot find them on the internet, and only barely in books (for you would have to know where to find those books). This city seems to say: why would I declare who I am to people I don't know?
It is summer here. Today has been the first day we could breathe normally, without that oppressive heat, making it impossible to put the laundry away without breaking a sweat. As I sit before my computer, half writing this post, half surfing the net - I could not find a reference I wanted to use in this post - I hear the city waking up. After nine am! Now, the dogs are barking, I hear cutlery clashing against plates, it is breakfast time. I suppose everyone is like me, dreaming of the distant seas we stare at, longingly, on our TV screens, but learning how to be lazy in our little flats. Some people are outside in their cars, honking their little horns: those are the people who have a means of transport to reach the mountains in this country, where you can walk the wild fields and pick your own herbs for tea.
And while something has been lost from this city; once upon a time, grannies in black veils sold village cheese at the market stalls, the magic city has not dissipated. It lingers in the old stories that refuse to go away because the hardship remains. Chicks with their mother hen are transported great distances in the boot of a single car; tiny gardens are formed with tomatoes and onion. These micro-scale exchanges are the final bastions; the warrior factions who hide in the hills. Will the magic remain in the onslaught of shiny malls and credit cards?
This summer, nobody went away on holiday, but Africa came to us, if only in the changed summer climate. We have been forced to slow down, to rethink; to dream again. What is it that we are looking for?

Dots.

Express

It is already one of those days that even the birds find too hot. This morning, I walked by a poor pigeon, languishing with feathers fluffed out in the only, cloudy, puddle it could find. The ravens give menacing looks from beneath the shade of trees, beaks open, reminding me of dogs - which are nowhere to be seen.
It is the kind of day in which one seems to live despite oneself, and the old folk in the market say, "So be it!" And it is on this kind of day that the troubling questions which had been lingering in the recess of the mind like to step forward, and say, "Hi." Although they are not usually that pleasant, and one sees them lurking there, just at the entrance, and one must coax them forwards, to get the exchange over with. This is what I call expression-which, after all, means the act of pressing out. But the word could hardly better explain, at least to my mind, what is involved in expression, "the action of squeezing out."
The other day, I tried to write about holidays, but today I realised what I was really trying to say. And that thought is the one that I coaxed forwards as I came back from the market. It had been hanging around my mind all week, only to come forth on this anxious day, when even the pigeons are hiding, far from the roofs they usually strut around on.
It is no wonder I feel alone, sometimes. We all do - it is like part of the weather: sometimes hot, sometimes cold - as the old folk say, "So be it!" But what I realised today was how in many ways my past is under threat of being chopped off, like an unwanted limb. And I so long for at least some remnants of "before." I have most successfully reconnected to it  by going on holiday - seeing old friends, repeating the old pattern of having the world as my oyster.
After realising this thought, which had been lingering like an unwanted child, I understood myself better. I often struggle with understanding myself better. As if I were always being asked by someone to explain myself, to settle the account of who I am. Who is this person? I don't know. But the questions begin as a reaction to conversations with people who sound so sure of themselves; in a move of self defeat, I usually indicate I am aware of my own weaknesses or shortcomings. I then feel driven to a process where I am moved to express myself, to myself.
I realise how much courage is necessary to live a beautiful life: one must be ready to laugh and cry. However hard we try to remain indifferent by installing the air conditioner of the mind, orphan thoughts can come forth from the depths and find us. If we want to remain alive, we must be ready to feel pain - unless we want to live with ghost limbs, but even they have been known to itch, mysteriously.
And it is only in asking the question, however painful, that one can get the answer. "So be it!" These are the ways of things. But one thing I can say: unless the heat is turned on, nothing's cooking. Mobility is sometimes spurred on when the fire is lit beneath one...

Dots.

holiday collectors

Tonight, the sky looked like the sea, with all those bluish lines of clouds and impressions of depth. The sky seemed to be calling to ships, to voyages...
I think that for the well-travelled person, the summer holiday becomes a matter of entitlement; once the horizon has been broadened, it becomes a matter of good circulation to keep various lands awake in the circuit of the mind.
For if I were asked to explain the salubrious effect of travel, I would list: the physical reminder that one truly does walk this earth in all its diversity; the tessera hospitalis one picks up - those Roman friendship symbols that are split in two: half kept by the host, the other by the visitor, in the case that they ever meet again, they will recognize each other. Those are beautiful things. But how necessary is it to travel?
Could one not expand the imagination by watching a good film, or documentary? Is travelling not like Disneyland for the sentient soul, verging on fantasy and desire? And as for the sights that we see,it is prudent to ask whether they make us into better people.
An answer lies in the tesserae; κύβος can either refer to those friendship tokens mentioned above, but it can also refer to dice used in the game of chance. The friendship tokens were made from the same material as dice, and were the same shape: cubed, though sometimes oblong. It is this very same word and shape that is used to make up the mosaic.
Today, not everybody has the opportunity to travel; it may seem that everything is so close, yet so far away. The soul may long to for a panopoly of sights and smells to be used as protection later on, to have the reassuring thought that I went there, breathed in the genius loci of a different place. But that wish may not necessarily be granted - so the element of the die, of chance, reminds one that such things are not always in one's control. That even the mosaic of travel is within a much larger mosaic - that of life, in which the travel so many of us grew up on did not always exist; a life in which the museum may be inferior to spending a day boating with friends.
The nicest kind of travel involves going to visit friends, because the time with the friend in a distant land can become like a leitmotif, framing the quotidian. Once upon a time, travelling salesmen would also sometimes be the bearer of stories. We crave those peeks into life that we bring to each other when we visit, or receive a guest in our home. We crave seeing what is around us everyday as something new, which happens through those experienced stories. Brought through travel or the traveller.
I don't know if the chance of my summer will open up to afford me travel; I hope so, but I do not want to feel enslaved to having to. Is this not like those indoctrinations that slip into our upbringing: a child must play the piano, must be an equestrian, must speak foreign languages. Will these activities necessarily make the child happier, wiser? Could it not develop intelligence through other means, like Rousseau's Emile? By extension, I wonder to myself if I have been taught to think I must travel, when all I need could be right in front of me. So, I end this post with the κύβος: no matter what we do this summer, may it be beautiful, bring character to the mosaic of our lives, and involve good friends and lots of laughs.

Dots.

miracle land

The sun offered this day to us on a silver platter. It spread out open, like a traveling salesman's wares, and there was the feeling that one couldn't go wrong, no matter which shiny object caught one's attention.
But the fleeting moments of peace were misguiding. The peace resides not in the moment. The moment belongs to peace, testing us, to see if we are ready for perfection. Because when those uncomfortable scenarios begin, one has to believe in happiness, despite the odds.
I've been thinking of Plotinus's take on Plato: he thought our vision of the world depended entirely on the level of the hierarchy towards the ideal we're on. In other words, we can't see until we're at the level that affords such vision. It reminds me of what scholars mumble: the answer lies in choosing the right methodology.
I began to think about places and, after a conversation this morning which led to the title of this post, I wonder if there aren't geographical locations, Invisible Cities, where one's vision directly informs one's immediate experience... Places with so many layers, that all experiences can play out, without interference. A place so complex, it rests on contradiction and paradox.
This would be a place people would come to if they wanted to find themselves, and to understand that there is a soul, and that the lived life is permeated with mystery.
This weekend, I read The Kitchn's Weekend Meditation, Shop Like a Parisian, ending: "We often give convenience the highest priority without examining what we really want and need our lives to be. We assume that inconvenience is a negative aspect but in fact it's just a state of mind, based on our priorities." Imagine a geographical destination devoid of convenience, where necessity is called on to mother into existence a system that is a wisp away from collapse, and yet continues, if teetering, to function. It defies all odds, and yet, is this not one of the secrets of existence?

What are our priorities? What does it mean to be alive?
It is the truly wise person who can answer these questions with peace of mind. Calmly accepting the limited view which shimmies and shifts along with the imperfection of mortal time. 
This weekend, thanks to this direction to a beautiful article on botany, I also thought about Thoreau's quote, "The question is not what you look at, but what you see." It brings me back to where I started. Sometimes, a beautiful day can unwrap an unseemly "gift," and one may want to balk. But, lazy bones! It is up to the creative mind to keep it beautiful, to accept that there are some things we do not have power over in the given moment. Smile! You're on candid camera! 
There are some places that are far, far away from convenience. These are the places that have been cast away by the world that is strutting proudly "forwards," where one learns, through all that is lacking, how to see what one has. Over and over again, one's eyes are trained not to see what is there, but what is behind the objects, the snippets of daily conversation, the chores, the traveling to and fro. There are some moments when questions like how... and livelihood? and children! seem to take on an absurdity, mere scratches on the surface of the larger mystery of existence - again, where each discovers as deeply as they can; where one realises that it is more than enough if one lifts one's head off the pillow, eats, meets friends, has a laugh... What crazy "more" could one want? Why ask for such craziness! Jan Morris called this place Hav. I call it home. 

 The heaven unexpected came,
To lives that thought their worshipping
A too presumptuous psalm.

  Elements: rose, maybememories: Animus; photo idea: pugly pixel;

thread: Shabby blog.

swimming

This morning, I went on a little walk around my neighbourhood, examining it in the new season's icy-bright sun. I remember what it used to look like, ten years ago, so much more 'local'. I also thought about how much I have changed.
And it seemed to me for a moment that my life has consisted of a series of swimming exercises. Periods of life that had for their purpose the increase of my stamina, so that I would have the strength later to get to where I needed.
It was a morning of memories, on that walk. I thought a lot about Kenneth, my writing professor at college, who I dearly miss. I remember before I met him, being in Paris with some people I'd met at the Shakespeare and Company's Sunday teas, particularly the boy with a pierced nose, who mocked my poetry. And then meeting Kenneth the next year, who believed that anyone with an ear could become a poet, if they worked at it. I remembered all our dinners at Ollie's, a Chinese restaurant across the street from campus. It's funny how many intersections exist in our lives between our past and present: for me, the Chinese thread is of golden significance. And Kenneth, who was so much like my cosmopolitan father. Memories live in cultures and in foods, those special dishes, that don't exist anywhere else.
But what of those complicated cultures, that are spread out like octopi. Like, if I say, stuffed, pickled cabbage leaves, which culture do you think the dish belongs to? Or, stuffed peppers? Many cultures claim as their own the dishes that are contained within them all. Divisions emerge in this life of ours, hence the emergence of crossroads. I read today that Europe flourished after the middle ages precisely because it was divided. Of course, that is the "Europe" that was not occupied by the Turks.
It is curious where we decide to draw the lines. What I try to teach my students is that we should never take those lines for granted; they are not set in stone. And our lives are a line - the line we are drawing for ourselves across the unlined oceans. My line has something to do with the crossroads between East and West, something to do with finding one's own voice à l'Amérique, but also trying to figure out what it means to be local, and part of a much greater whole.
But what I also say to my students is this: look for what is precious to you, become aware of it, and respect it in your work. One of the things Kenneth did that was so amazing was to bring poems by Blake and Herrick into elementary school classrooms, and make them accessible, by asking children to address the nature, animals and colours around them. Those poems, then, were not relegated to the dusty canon, but became real and accessible.
What do we want of our traditions to become real and accessible? It is time to bring our best out of our closets. What will you bring forth, to this journey of life, as we swim across oceans, on imaginary lines?

 Elements: minitoko; aramisdream.

My never-never land

Over a decade ago, I made a decision to move to a country that is, as far as many are concerned, a hinterland. It is a small country, but like any small country, it is so full of regional variants that one cannot help but be reminded of how inefficient generalisations can be.
But I maintain that I know the essence of the country: that I saw it then, and that I see it now even though, as I said, there are many variations on the theme in this country. This very evening, I encountered a soul who was indignant that I would dare idealise his country.
Yes, I idealise this country. I see it - as I had when I first visited - partly as a pillaged sacrifice. Where there is the ruckus of repudiation, there is usually a scapegoat.  Whether the goat had a hoof in things or not becomes less relevant when it is asked to pay for the wrongdoing with its life.
I idealise this country insofar as I look, wherever I can, to restore its honour and beauty.
Honour and beauty are considered ideals. Ideals are problematic because it has yet to happen for a societal utopia to be realised on the earth. So, to idealise a country means that one may encounter a contrary reality. Like tonight.
But the funny thing about ideals, like love, is that if one is able - despite all the pettiness that can gather like dust around us every day - to perceive more beautiful, eternal aspects of a subject, we are not put off by the ugly things. It can happen that "Nature, like us, is sometimes caught   /   without her diadem," but what is ugly eventually blows over.
The sky is low, the clouds are mean,   /   A travelling flake of snow   /   Across a barn or through a rut   /   Debates if it will go.      /      A narrow wind complains all day   /   How some one treated him;   /   Nature, like us, is sometimes caught   /   Without her diadem.
The ultimate point is, there is a diadem for us to wear! The diadem is our ideals, it is an eternal category. While we may not necessarily reach them, we have something to work towards. Why bother? Well, if the ideals are beautiful, one's movement toward them is also beautiful.
We dust our houses, we clean our clothes, but we do not necessarily brush our souls off; we do not brush off the pettiness of the circumstantial. There is much in history that is circumstantial that "complains all day," but it passes, the picture shifts.
Are we really so naive to think that there are "bad" countries out there? Isn't that a little like a children's tale? Oh, that bad land with the wicked people. Every nation can be praised for something.
To look for ideals is to be taught by perfection, as opposed to playing the chameleon, whose fruits will be taken by the one looking for perfection, for they will perfect it. To have ideals is also to know when to not insist on them. Perfection teaches imperfection, which leads to perfection.
I idealise the country I live in. One day, I will tell the story of this country.

Elements: Eames bird: curbly; graph paper and bunting: pugly pixel.

Fashioning

In many ways, I do not feel that I belong to this age. I feel that my sensibilities belong to a past time, and can demonstrate this by how much I enjoyed a primary school project we had to do, called "Manners". However, as I continue to read about what I'd describe as the history of ideas, I have discovered aspects of myself that are deeply married to this age.
Let us call this a pluralistic approach to culture; I share an openness to cultural variety and reject comparing them on a standardised scale. While such an approach is already more than 200 years old, I would say it is characteristic only of a post World War II world (do you see the tautology there?).
I have found that my earlier approach to poetry was by no means original, but the same old hash that has been bantering around in different guises since the Romantics took Soul to the streets. I now understand, for example, my frustration at not being able to get over myself in my poems, and now see this as an extension of the bourgeois obsession of self, as seen in Flaubert, Stendhal, Proust.
I once wanted to distance myself from the West and such idiosyncrasies, and have since found that I am not unlike Rilke, or even any of the Romantics who sought a return "to the basics", back to a more peasant lifestyle. Such reactionism has already been played out. Or has it?
Here is where I see the exciting moment of my life: the place where I can make my contribution. Here, I'm thinking of Ricoeur's thought that "No one can say what will become of our civilization when it has really met different civilizations... We have to admit that this encounter has not yet taken place at the level of authentic dialogue." Not have we resolved how to "become modern and return to sources".

This has not happened because some cultures are still being masked over by the "barbaric" projections of the West, and have not been given the space to develop their own dialogue. I am still grateful to Deborah Root's Cannibal Cultures for revealing that just as one man can "project on" another, societies can do the same on a larger scale. And it is fascinating to me that people who pride themselves as "free thinkers" can stumble into such blind spots. Or that in today's self-proclaimed 'free world dialogue' people who speak in the name of faith are automatically considered backwards even though it is proved time and again that any system of thought is backward if it becomes dogma or too rigid. It is not the thought system that becomes harmful, but the zeal with which one subscribes to it.
The modern project is far from being over. Terms like "post modernism" trick us into thinking that we are ahead of the game, as if we, as a human race, have become older. I do not like such thinking, because it implies "wisdom" - which has been discredited by many modern thinkers as irrelevant. Perhaps they discredit it because it is the measuring rod they do not perform well against. The context of the word is indeed a little slippery, because it involves betterment of self, but is it not relevant to ask: is it wise to wage war?
What I have learned from studying culture is that it does not move in one direction. It is received, reshaped, given back; hybrids emerge. My favourite example is the way that many African subcultures literally refashion Western fashions (ex. here). This is an example of how the modern project is far from being over. Culture is not static, it is constantly in flux, and at the moment, we are in a phase of absorbing the great changes in communication that have taken place in the past half century. New and unexpected forms will emerge - and they will not be the kind controlled by the modernist project. Why? Because just as much as culture is dictated and assimilated, it is also refashioned. Because not all voices are heard all the time, unexpected songs can emerge from where they are least expected. It is exciting to live in one's time, though certainly not without its challenges.

Elements: buttons and embroidery: minitoko;

manila bag, graph paper, sequins: pugly pixel;

staple: shabby princess.

Much Love Monday and Travel Note

For today's Much Love Monday, I love vacations with travel.
Sometimes, even when it is not vacation time, it is refreshing to remind oneself of other lands, and that life can transpire in more than one way.
What is exciting to me about vacations with travel is when the trip happens unexpectedly. Initially, I did not anticipate that I would have a summer holiday this year, but what with a friend in Greece and etc, the holiday door was swung wide open.
I'd read several years back, in either The Secret Door to Success or The Game of Life and How to Play It, that even if there is no reason for one to expect good things, one should prepare for them. An example given to illustrate this point was of a person who had wanted to go on  holiday, but didn't have enough money for travel. So, this person spent the money they did have on a suitcase and a bathing suit (or something like this). Then, it happened that this person did get a chance to go on holiday - and was prepared for it. I often think of this example, not because I am a fan of magical thinking, though my citing books with the titles above may make one think otherwise, but because I don't think I have anything to lose by hoping for the best.
Now, isn't that a thought vacation!

 Elements: buttons and embroidery: minitoko;

honeycomb paper, envelope, dots, sequins, doily, shipping tag: pugly pixel;

background of photo: marie claire idees.

As I will be travelling, I am not sure how often I will be able to update this blog. Please count on me being back in about two weeks' time, and my posting vacation posts if I am able before then!

The topic of friendship

Topos filos. You know the word topic, which means "commonplace" - "of a place". Ultimately, we pick topics that are either comprehensible to all, or that we will make comprehensible for our audience.
I have been thinking a lot about places. Why is it one feels a greater need to revisit one place, instead of another? I think my friend put it really nicely: "I don't know London as well as I do New York City, so I have less of a reason to go back." So, largely, places are pleasing due to their familiarity. Yet, we know that through education, we are meant to "broaden our horizons," or, in this case, broaden our topics.
But I will throw a token of friendship into this topic fountain, and let us see the results.
Even if we know a place well, if our friends have gone from the place, it becomes a ghost town. If we go to a place we have never visited before, where we have friends, we feel at home.
But who are our friends? According to reviews I've read of Dunbar's How Many Friends Does a Person Need?, the answer is a few good ones, who are subject to change. He claims we always have about 10-15 closer acquaintances, the kind of people one could borrow money from at an airport (funny example, no?).
I might agree with this, especially if applying the proverb, a friend in need is a friend indeed. Friends become touchstones: the quartz used to test the quality of gold or silver.
If we become better people as we grow, the quality of our friends changes: not necessarily becoming "better" friends, but by becoming those who can improve those areas of ourselves that need improving.
If you disagree so far, how about this idea: that our friends are those who are willing to make sacrifices for us - and vice versa.
I once met a girl, in one of those bizarre degrees of separation that I can say happen most frequently in metropolises, who told me a story of her youth. She had a friend who wanted to end his life, so she volunteered by saying that if this was so important to him, she would end her own life with him. Without sharing all the details of this story, they both lived, though her parents severely scolded for her action (yet she saved his life, by agreeing to partake of his emotions - which were not her own).
I think that friendship is one of the most intense schools of life, one of the most complex topics.
Earlier today, I was reading about font maker Natalia Vasilyeva over at MyFonts. The interview covered topics that included place, or topos. While she was not asked about friendship, something that she said seemed to me applicable to the topic of true friendship (so I am taking it out of context):
"In my opinion we have an obligation to understand the internal essence of any object we’re dealing with. I don’t understand people (and there are plenty of them) who are satisfied with monotonous activity within one fixed scenario."
Friendship will bring us even so far as to territories that we had never anticipated setting foot on (yes, literally). We will come to know realities we had never dreamed of (in a positive and negative sense), and we will be faced with new essences that challenge us, but ultimately enrich us.
Ultimately, we broaden our horizons through friendship, not places.

Elements: buttons and embroidery: minitoko; 

 sequins, shipping tag, envelope, dotted circles, doily, honeycomb paper: pugly pixel.