Maybe all people are drunks, I suspect. Drunk on alcohol, prayer, horseracing, work, order or anything else. Some are more evolved drunks, who can discipline themselves and funnel their energy into high achievements. Most are middling drunks, who get their kick in church or in the pub. The lowest kinds are just pigs.
Maybe when God, if he exists, looks down at men, he actually sees a group of drunks tittering in various directions, bumping into each other, or alone with their individual source of intoxication. Some of those who get their kick from prayer are able to gaze into his face, for a few seconds, and hurry down the slopes of the mountain, to tell of what of they saw. But down in the valley, others are swilling down their own drinks- money, status, collecting stamps, science, and they listen to him the way drunks in a tavern listen to one of them shouting his personal mad story. Some get thrilled by what they heard, and start drinking his God-drink, to get the kick that he experienced. Others remain faithful to their own liquor, because they don’t want to mix drinks.
Jalal ud Rumi said:
All day I think about it, then at night I say it.
Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?
I have no idea.
My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that,
and I intend to end up there.
This drunkenness began in some other tavern.
When I get back around to that place,
I'll be completely sober. Meanwhile,
I'm like a bird from another continent, sitting in this aviary.
The day is coming when I fly off,
but who is it now in my ear who hears my voice?
Who says words with my mouth?
Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul?
I cannot stop asking.
If I could taste one sip of an answer,
I could break out of this prison for drunks.
I didn't come here of my own accord, and I can't leave that way.
Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.
This poetry. I never know what I'm going to say.
I don't plan it.
When I'm outside the saying of it,
I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.
We have a huge barrel of wine, but no cups.
That's fine with us. Every morning
we glow and in the evening we glow again.
They say there's no future for us. They're right.
Which is fine with us.
I am surprised by the profound irrationality of people. As a child, I was brought in a world of order, where , when I asked questions, there were parents and teachers to give me reasonable answers. Good parents take care to make a child feel there is a structure to the world, because he needs it for his mental sanity as he grows up. We do not only make children believe in Santa Klaus, we make them believe the world itself is some kind of Santa Klaus, something rational and benevolent. Later we realise that Santa Klaus does not exist, but most of us shield our minds to the fact that the world itself is not Santa. Or, maybe, we dig our heads into our drunkenness to forget the disorder of the world, like children who go on arrangeing their stamp collection on the dinner table, while their parents are throwing dishes at each other, because it would be too painful to feel the reality.
I remember, as a child, watching the film “Shoa” and asking my parents why Hitler killed the Jews, and I could feel that they were struggling with an answer. This, I thought, was because they were not well informed. I thought that there was some reason, certainly not a justifiable one, but one which made sense to the person, and which one could understand ( in the sense of “coldly following the logic”, not that of empathising). Now as a grown up, I can understand the logic, or rather , the feeling, for like most people I have in me what some call “the reptilian mind” , a lower level of mind which contains a cold-blooded hatred. It is like the cellar in a horror film, in which lives a monster, while the actors are living a normal life in the ground floor. Not only did Hitler let loose that monster, but something strange happened, more horrifying than the existence of that creature. It actually blended itself with the rationality of civilisation. It took a methodical, bureaucratic character, companies sent letters to the concerned ministry, detailing the efficiency of their toxic gases, of their incinerators. Local policemen in occupied countries saw to it that Jews and others were rounded up, and boarded their trains to the concentration camps in disciplined fashion. Society itself became monstrous. It was not an exceptional occurrence. I have heard that in Rwanda, the killing squads worked from 9 to 5 o’clock, with a hour lunch at noon. Maybe there is a latent monstrosity even in the running of modern society. If one thinks of small –town capitalism in a place like Pakistan, for example, with its slave labour in the brickyards, its sweatshop carpet factories.
The reader will feel I am writing something profoundly banal. I am opposing romanticism ( the emphasis on man’s irrationality, his capacity to be a prophet, or a devil) to Kant’s belief in man’s capacity for reason. Hitler was a degraded descendant of German Romanticism, and Marx, despite all the deathly seriousness of later Marxist thought, had a romantic vision of a society based on fraternity, artistic self-realisation.
The Ancien Régime society corseted all of man’s rational and irrational impulses into the rigid founding myths of feudalism: the belief in the “Chain of Beings”, with God at the top, then the angels, then human society, headed by a monarchical family whose legitimacy lay enshrined in tradition, and down to the animal and plant kingdoms. The arrival of the French revolution freed both man’s reason and unreason. New spiritual beliefs, new blueprints of social organisation blossomed in the 19th century.
What is striking in modern society is the way many people blend, in their lifestyles, a rigidly rational behaviour at work with extreme irrationality in terms of their personal beliefs and lifestyle. One’s neighbour will, when buying a car, examine all available models, discuss their fuel efficiency, the reliability of their engines, their cost-quality ratio with friends. The same person will have a belief in the literal veracity of the Bible, for example, even down to the six days of creation and Noah’s ark. Of course, the Ancient Régime had its horsedealers, bankers and architects who were both shrewd and devout people. But their irrational beliefs were in concordance with the ruling myths of society. Today’s society offers no overarching myths, but in its very, slightly condescendent tolerance of all forms of belief, there is the tacit hope that somehow people will get to know better, in the long run. There is a latent dominance of the scientific point of view when explaining the universe.
Beyond the contradictions in the every day behaviour of religious fanatics, what is interesting to observe is how, while, in a way, the rationalist point of view has triumphed, in that it is the ruling paradigm when it comes organising society, to conducting scientific research, to the extraction of profit, yet when it comes to humanity’s intimate contact with the world, there irrationality rules. Even the most fanatical terrorist group will organise its cells with rigid discipline, conduct its financial transactions and plan its next attack with severe attention to detail. On the other hand, even the most severe-looking scientist will, upon closer examination, come out as a profoundly passionate man- if not, he would not have devoted his life to be a (most of the time) badly paid researcher. The most surprising group in this regard is the communists, who are , most of the time, very rationalist in their view of the world, being atheistic and admirative of science. Yet their understanding of human nature is surprisingly naïve, full of a sentimental belief in the goodness of the Worker, in the possibility of a society fuelled by altruism and fraternity.
In the 19th century, there was a belief that scientific progress was not only a method, but a philosophy of life itself, and that the world would one become a paradise of moderate, practical people. I guess nowadays, not only do a great many people feel a certain dread when they learn of the latest “achievements” of science in genetics or artificial intelligence, but there is a realisation that society will never be a conclave of wise,rational persons, but more like Rumi’s tavern, where drunks will forever make wild boasts of their achievements, quote bad poetry at the waitress, and quarrel about their favourite football teams.
Friday, July 20, 2007
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Some ideas given to me by a friend, who is reading a French translation of “Extremely loud and incredibly close” by Jonathan Safran Foer:
“I am almost through it, and I am thinking about the odd fact that the US is the world’s first covert, unofficial, empire. We may call it a “soft” empire, or a quasi-empire. I think the author is aware of it, because , having read three quarters of it, I notice that he describes the suffering of those who lost someone on September 11 2001, but also mentions the bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima, by American bombers.
Empires are light and shadow. The Roman Empire was great, to the point that some people in Eastern Germany and in Ireland bemoan the fact that it did not reach their parts. Yet every day was not party day under its yoke, ask Jesus Christ for details when you go up. The construction of an Empire comes at an immense human cost. Qin Shi Huang Di, the First Chinese Emperor standardised the Chinese script, thus giving it an advantage over, say, India, which persists to this day. Yet when he ordered that the bits and pieces of fortification which existed against Central Asian invaders be fused into one Great Wall, this gave rise to a immense tragedy, as millions of peasants lost their lives in building the wall stone by stone. On a lesser scale, Bismarck said that the German Empire would be forged by “iron and blood”. The great colonial empires of the 19th century spread themselves with great suffering for both the conquered and the Irish, Indian and other soldiery who were the “conquerors” ( these were Empires good at using the just colonised to invade the yet-to-colonise).
The imperialist, obviously, has an edge over those he conquers. Once the terrible job of conquest is done, many of his new subjects find benefit in his rule, for he opens new trade routes, brings in a rich culture and an efficient administrative system. What would India have been, if not for the British ? A hodge-podge of Nepals, probably.
The American quasi Empire is a new model. Its Navy , linked together by a network of bases across the Earth, is incomparable. Even at the peak of its power, the Soviet Union could not build anything which could match with such an awesome fleet. When China fired missiles at Taiwan in 1999, trying to frighten its people out of voting for a party which Beijing considered to be pro-independence, the apparition of two US Navy task forces ( the modest name given to the group consisting of a US aircraft carrier, escorted by gunships and submarines) in Taiwanese waters silenced its guns.
The US fulfills one of the essential functions of Empire in that its existence ensures relative stability in the world. Were a giant moth to swallow it at this very moment, North Korea would immediately send its famished troops in human waves to feed themselves in the McDonalds of Seoul. China would first lurch over Taiwan then would look askance at Japan, which would by that time have blown off a few atomic bombs in the Pacific to steel its nerves. Libya would discover a new hunger for Chad. Syria would gobble up Lebanon, if Israel had not already blown the whole Middle East to nuclear ashes, just to feel safe. Russia’s voice when talking to the rest of Europe, especially the tiny Balts, would acquire a steely edge. India would feel its arms itching for a good once-over with Pakistan. Sudan would make a short meal out of its Darfur rebels and unearth some old grudges against Ethiopia and Uganda, America’s blue-eyed boys in that part of Africa. The Muslims in Bosnia, the Albanians in Kossovo would join the Pithecantropus in science museums.
The Pax Americana exists. It is not benevolent. Empires are like Lovecraft’s cold monsters, beyond good and evil. The war in Iraq, if one can make sense of that tenebrous affair, probably has as its aim the establishment of a pro-American regime that will guarantee a stable supply of oil from the Middle East, given that Saudi Arabia is not a reliable source in the long term ( the terrorists of September 11 were Saudis, and in the course of their investigations after the attacks, the Americans have probably discovered enough deep cracks in that strange kingdom to give them cause to pitch their war tents elsewhere).
America also fulfils the criterion of cosmopolitanism which marked older Empires. We may jeer at the shallowness of much of American culture, but the Babylonians probably did the same at the Medes, the old inhabitants of Constantinople at the Seljuk Turks, the Chinese at the Manchurians, the Greeks at the Romans. When American tourists ask the watchman at the Acropolis how much it costs, and wonder whether it will fit in between the swimming pool and the tennis court, they are probably walking in the footsteps of their Roman and Turkish predecessors.
What matters is a generosity of spirit, a willingness to take off the leather armour and learn the ways of the harem, that perfumed place where ( what were you thinking ?) many pleasant hours are spent in chess and witty conversation. Such breadth of mind, America has in ample store. It is as cosmopolitan a place as any Empire ever was. In Bill Clinton, if we are to believe Toni Morrison ( whom I have not read, unfortunately), it has had its first black President. Will then, his wife be the first Black woman president ? A question to be asked ( but not to Barack Obama).
Yet America shies from being a full-blown empire. Probably because that would be difficult. The world is a big place, after all. I am skating on thin ice here, but I feel that many ancient Empires had a certain instability in them, in that their very existence caused outlying states to rally against them, to provoke border squirmishes to which, by pride, they would answer, thus causing endless bloodshed at the edges. Not that it was a bad thing in itself , because it kept the troops busy instead of loafing around dangerously in the capital’s caserns. Yet, overall, there is great advantage, in modern times, in not proclaiming oneself an Empire. One avoids unnecessary provocation. The world economic system is subtle enough that one may manipulate it under the cover of a level-playing field.
A real world Empire would be unattainable. Even America’s allies are difficult to keep in check. France leaps to the mind in this respect. It has spoiled the mind of other European nations, to the point that China has a field day playing off Airbus against Boeing, American steel, cars and trains against European ones…but France is not the only culprit. Think of Saudi Arabia, whose citizens finance lunatic madrassahs in Pakistan, to the point where that country has become a battlefield between fanatical sunnism and shiism.
And think of India. I really wonder why America has rushed so fast to become India’s ally in the past few years. China and India will one day become the big powers of Asia. There’s a “one day” in that sentence. Does it make sense to commit oneself to one side so early in the game ? Wouldn’t it have been wiser to keep oneself at a safe, stern distance from these two hulks ?
In the course of this century, I believe that many of America’s troubles, once the wave of Wahabism which is sweeping through the Islamic world will have subsided ( and it shall subside, for moderate Muslims around the world are already fed up with the misery it is heaping on them, they who have to face not only its bombs, as other passengers in buses have to, but the retaliation from the crowd afterwards) shall come from India, that big, young country ( it does not have an ageing population , like China). The Indian character is restless, excitable, emotional. It likes guns and uniforms the way a child does. India is one of the rare countries in the world which holds a full-blown military parade on its national day. The other country which comes to mind in this respect, interestingly, is France.
Al Qaida was born from the mujjahedin training camps on the 80’s in Pakistan which were managed by a dynamic CIA operative called Osama Bin Laden. America shall yet again sow the seeds of woe by arming an enthusiastic India against China. The latter, for all its sins against Taiwan and its occasional hisses against Japan, is a pragmatic nation by nature. Even in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, it was wise enough to edge closer to the United States when the Russian bear growled at its door in 1972. America, in the end, is charmingly weak at judging character. It is an idealistic nation, which cannot stand having a Nixon at its head, when other nations would crave to have such a statesman. It prefers the homespun nonsense of a Reagan or a Bush junior to the boring, standoffish likes of a Gore or a Kelly. It wants style at the top. But style is something that belongs to the boudoir, the smart neighbourhoods, the silver screen. The corridors of power are the domain of the likes of Mitterand, John Major, Margaret Thatcher, Bismarck, Richelieu, Frederick the Great and other insufferable bores. Even Napoleon was a workalholic and a cuckold. The devil may wear Prada, but nobody bothers what Atlas has to cover his loins”.
Interesting stuff, isn’t it ?
“I am almost through it, and I am thinking about the odd fact that the US is the world’s first covert, unofficial, empire. We may call it a “soft” empire, or a quasi-empire. I think the author is aware of it, because , having read three quarters of it, I notice that he describes the suffering of those who lost someone on September 11 2001, but also mentions the bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima, by American bombers.
Empires are light and shadow. The Roman Empire was great, to the point that some people in Eastern Germany and in Ireland bemoan the fact that it did not reach their parts. Yet every day was not party day under its yoke, ask Jesus Christ for details when you go up. The construction of an Empire comes at an immense human cost. Qin Shi Huang Di, the First Chinese Emperor standardised the Chinese script, thus giving it an advantage over, say, India, which persists to this day. Yet when he ordered that the bits and pieces of fortification which existed against Central Asian invaders be fused into one Great Wall, this gave rise to a immense tragedy, as millions of peasants lost their lives in building the wall stone by stone. On a lesser scale, Bismarck said that the German Empire would be forged by “iron and blood”. The great colonial empires of the 19th century spread themselves with great suffering for both the conquered and the Irish, Indian and other soldiery who were the “conquerors” ( these were Empires good at using the just colonised to invade the yet-to-colonise).
The imperialist, obviously, has an edge over those he conquers. Once the terrible job of conquest is done, many of his new subjects find benefit in his rule, for he opens new trade routes, brings in a rich culture and an efficient administrative system. What would India have been, if not for the British ? A hodge-podge of Nepals, probably.
The American quasi Empire is a new model. Its Navy , linked together by a network of bases across the Earth, is incomparable. Even at the peak of its power, the Soviet Union could not build anything which could match with such an awesome fleet. When China fired missiles at Taiwan in 1999, trying to frighten its people out of voting for a party which Beijing considered to be pro-independence, the apparition of two US Navy task forces ( the modest name given to the group consisting of a US aircraft carrier, escorted by gunships and submarines) in Taiwanese waters silenced its guns.
The US fulfills one of the essential functions of Empire in that its existence ensures relative stability in the world. Were a giant moth to swallow it at this very moment, North Korea would immediately send its famished troops in human waves to feed themselves in the McDonalds of Seoul. China would first lurch over Taiwan then would look askance at Japan, which would by that time have blown off a few atomic bombs in the Pacific to steel its nerves. Libya would discover a new hunger for Chad. Syria would gobble up Lebanon, if Israel had not already blown the whole Middle East to nuclear ashes, just to feel safe. Russia’s voice when talking to the rest of Europe, especially the tiny Balts, would acquire a steely edge. India would feel its arms itching for a good once-over with Pakistan. Sudan would make a short meal out of its Darfur rebels and unearth some old grudges against Ethiopia and Uganda, America’s blue-eyed boys in that part of Africa. The Muslims in Bosnia, the Albanians in Kossovo would join the Pithecantropus in science museums.
The Pax Americana exists. It is not benevolent. Empires are like Lovecraft’s cold monsters, beyond good and evil. The war in Iraq, if one can make sense of that tenebrous affair, probably has as its aim the establishment of a pro-American regime that will guarantee a stable supply of oil from the Middle East, given that Saudi Arabia is not a reliable source in the long term ( the terrorists of September 11 were Saudis, and in the course of their investigations after the attacks, the Americans have probably discovered enough deep cracks in that strange kingdom to give them cause to pitch their war tents elsewhere).
America also fulfils the criterion of cosmopolitanism which marked older Empires. We may jeer at the shallowness of much of American culture, but the Babylonians probably did the same at the Medes, the old inhabitants of Constantinople at the Seljuk Turks, the Chinese at the Manchurians, the Greeks at the Romans. When American tourists ask the watchman at the Acropolis how much it costs, and wonder whether it will fit in between the swimming pool and the tennis court, they are probably walking in the footsteps of their Roman and Turkish predecessors.
What matters is a generosity of spirit, a willingness to take off the leather armour and learn the ways of the harem, that perfumed place where ( what were you thinking ?) many pleasant hours are spent in chess and witty conversation. Such breadth of mind, America has in ample store. It is as cosmopolitan a place as any Empire ever was. In Bill Clinton, if we are to believe Toni Morrison ( whom I have not read, unfortunately), it has had its first black President. Will then, his wife be the first Black woman president ? A question to be asked ( but not to Barack Obama).
Yet America shies from being a full-blown empire. Probably because that would be difficult. The world is a big place, after all. I am skating on thin ice here, but I feel that many ancient Empires had a certain instability in them, in that their very existence caused outlying states to rally against them, to provoke border squirmishes to which, by pride, they would answer, thus causing endless bloodshed at the edges. Not that it was a bad thing in itself , because it kept the troops busy instead of loafing around dangerously in the capital’s caserns. Yet, overall, there is great advantage, in modern times, in not proclaiming oneself an Empire. One avoids unnecessary provocation. The world economic system is subtle enough that one may manipulate it under the cover of a level-playing field.
A real world Empire would be unattainable. Even America’s allies are difficult to keep in check. France leaps to the mind in this respect. It has spoiled the mind of other European nations, to the point that China has a field day playing off Airbus against Boeing, American steel, cars and trains against European ones…but France is not the only culprit. Think of Saudi Arabia, whose citizens finance lunatic madrassahs in Pakistan, to the point where that country has become a battlefield between fanatical sunnism and shiism.
And think of India. I really wonder why America has rushed so fast to become India’s ally in the past few years. China and India will one day become the big powers of Asia. There’s a “one day” in that sentence. Does it make sense to commit oneself to one side so early in the game ? Wouldn’t it have been wiser to keep oneself at a safe, stern distance from these two hulks ?
In the course of this century, I believe that many of America’s troubles, once the wave of Wahabism which is sweeping through the Islamic world will have subsided ( and it shall subside, for moderate Muslims around the world are already fed up with the misery it is heaping on them, they who have to face not only its bombs, as other passengers in buses have to, but the retaliation from the crowd afterwards) shall come from India, that big, young country ( it does not have an ageing population , like China). The Indian character is restless, excitable, emotional. It likes guns and uniforms the way a child does. India is one of the rare countries in the world which holds a full-blown military parade on its national day. The other country which comes to mind in this respect, interestingly, is France.
Al Qaida was born from the mujjahedin training camps on the 80’s in Pakistan which were managed by a dynamic CIA operative called Osama Bin Laden. America shall yet again sow the seeds of woe by arming an enthusiastic India against China. The latter, for all its sins against Taiwan and its occasional hisses against Japan, is a pragmatic nation by nature. Even in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, it was wise enough to edge closer to the United States when the Russian bear growled at its door in 1972. America, in the end, is charmingly weak at judging character. It is an idealistic nation, which cannot stand having a Nixon at its head, when other nations would crave to have such a statesman. It prefers the homespun nonsense of a Reagan or a Bush junior to the boring, standoffish likes of a Gore or a Kelly. It wants style at the top. But style is something that belongs to the boudoir, the smart neighbourhoods, the silver screen. The corridors of power are the domain of the likes of Mitterand, John Major, Margaret Thatcher, Bismarck, Richelieu, Frederick the Great and other insufferable bores. Even Napoleon was a workalholic and a cuckold. The devil may wear Prada, but nobody bothers what Atlas has to cover his loins”.
Interesting stuff, isn’t it ?
Monday, July 16, 2007
Some more thoughts about Maria Ozawa: what disturbs me about her being a porn star is her gracefulness. While in Yugoslavia, Nicolas Bouvier was asked to write an article in a women’s magazine. He was given a lead: here in Yugoslavia, women can vote while in France, they can’t ( this was in the early fifties) . What do you think of that ? Amazingly he wrote that he had no fixed opinion on the matter and that after the short time time he had spent in Yugoslavia, he wished that the women there would militate less and spend more energy à essayer de plaire . This is difficult to translate. I could say: “(…) spend more energy at being charming” . But that sounds so trite. “(…) spend more energy at pleasing” sounds very servile. Plaire is not the same “to please”, it is more noble in the French scheme of things, more essential to life. Maybe we should go back to Shakespeare’s times. I think it’s at the end of Twelfth Night that the Fool comes upon the scene and apologizes for any blunders in the play, and assures the audience, groundlings included, “that we always strive to please”. Here, at a time when French and English were closer relatives, when Shakespeare wore a gold earing in one of his portraits ( personally, by the way, I believe that he wrote his own plays. I can’t understand the idea that someone can’t have been a genius because he had a modest, retiring life and was a sharp moneylender at the end of his life. Bach was a short tempered musician with twenty kids, Einstein was a bad husband of the normal kind and a civil servant in the Swiss administration. The idea that geniuses have to have odd lifestyles is a modern attempt to paint over the shallow hedonism of the likes of Elvis Presley with the gold varnish of genius) we find a better approximation of the idea of what “to please” meant in more refined times. It was an art de vivre , going much beyond the idea of pleasing one’s masters, though of course there were plenty of people who limited it to that.
The reader, if I have one, will think I have digressed far beyond the burning issue, which is, for her millions of adoring, heavily breathing fans, our great Maria Ozawa, but I am actually tacking close to the coast, as close as I can ever be in this world to her sweet self. Nicolas Bouvier, faced with what, to us readers 50 years later, seems the quaint topic of women’s right to vote, invokes the help of La Fontaine, who wrote somewhere in his charming (!) poems of “La grâce, plus belle encore que la beauté” ( Gracefulness, more beautiful even than beauty) . In those times, he assures us, the editor in chief of the women’s magazine only laughed at his opinions, which she found flattering but a trifle too frivolous to be published, and told him to write a fairy tale instead, which he did, after a tedious day walking around in Belgrade. Yet our man had touched on a vital subject.
Gracefulness. Porn stars are not supposed to have that quality. They, the descendants of the whores of the ancient brothels, should have a knowing smile, heavy, languid eyelids, massive, well oiled, breasts and buttocks. Their sexuality may be that of the horny farm girls they sometimes were, a few years before, if that simple, humorous randiness has survived the years in the brothel, or it could be the raunchy desire of the frustrated housewife ( One of the Roman satirists, I think it is Juvenal, wrote of the wife of one of the Emperors, one of the Virtuous Five, and he alleged that she, driven desperate by his sober lifestyle, spent all her nights in a cheap brothel, to be ridden upon by soldiers and merchants, only reluctantly leaving her smelly couch at the crack of dawn to return to her palace. Our tabloids sin by their hysterical industriousness, smashing their preys to pulp in Parisian tunnels. They lack the flights of fancy of their ancestors) , or it could be , as it probably is most of the time, a quick affair of undressing and a few moans, for in the end, the performance of a tired soldier or a drunk merchant comes to a paltry few thrusts and the crux of the matter is in putting on a maternal, understanding face as the client pours his heart out on the pillow afterwards, telling tales of bad deals, unfair pay, shrewish wives and grasping cousins.
All this everyday sexuality is the bread and butter of the whore. But the sacred groves of gracefulness… which make the heart leap as it remembers the first stirrings of love, at fourteen. That holy vessel of humanity, the secret jars in which the beloved keeps the waters of childhood – when the Lord speaks to Job of His power, He asks him: Do you know where I keep the great jars of the rain ? And the Muslims say that on the great night where the Prophet rode to Heaven on the mare Borak, the water in the jars becomes sweet ; isn’t the epitome of gracefulness the image of a woman carrying a jar back from the river, either on the side of her waist, or on her head ? Gracefulness finds its source in childhood because at its very heart lies a subtle gaucheness, a slight awkwardness of the wrist, of the hip, a tilt of the head, a hesitation, a shy withdrawal. Woman’s gracefulness is not the same as that of the snake or the leopard. Theirs is surer, more lethal. It may approach it, to the delight of the erotomaniac, but if it becomes completely like theirs, then it is deadly, to the further delight of said erotomaniac, because if he goes to the end of his cravings, then he wishes death (1) .
Baudelaire spoke of “les verts paradis des amours enfantines” in Moesta et Errabunda :
Mais le vert paradis des amours enfantines,
Les courses, les chansons, les baisers, les bouquets,
Les violons vibrant derrière les collines,
Avec les brocs de vin, le soir, dans les bosquets,
— Mais le vert paradis des amours enfantines,
L'innocent paradis, plein de plaisirs furtifs,
Est-il déjà plus loin que l'Inde et que la Chine?
Peut-on le rappeler avec des cris plaintifs,
Et l'animer encor d'une voix argentine,
L'innocent paradis plein de plaisirs furtifs?
At 13, a girl does not ( normally) have big breasts or buttocks. She only has her gracefulness, her vivacity- O the crystalline loves of that time ! “L’innocent paradis, plein de plaisirs furtifs”. Blessed the woman who can keep something of that in her adult years.
How odd that our Maria should spoil the water of her jars with the oil of the whore, the oil in the hair of her trader client, the oil in the voice of the Madame – nowadays a porn film executive in pin stripe suits. Ah well, that’s the way the world goes.
(1) Snakes and leopards do not laugh, and if they did, they would not cover their mouths with their hands ( with their tails, probably, in the case of snakes). Real, through-and-through eroticism is a grave matter, something undertakers should do as a side business.
The reader, if I have one, will think I have digressed far beyond the burning issue, which is, for her millions of adoring, heavily breathing fans, our great Maria Ozawa, but I am actually tacking close to the coast, as close as I can ever be in this world to her sweet self. Nicolas Bouvier, faced with what, to us readers 50 years later, seems the quaint topic of women’s right to vote, invokes the help of La Fontaine, who wrote somewhere in his charming (!) poems of “La grâce, plus belle encore que la beauté” ( Gracefulness, more beautiful even than beauty) . In those times, he assures us, the editor in chief of the women’s magazine only laughed at his opinions, which she found flattering but a trifle too frivolous to be published, and told him to write a fairy tale instead, which he did, after a tedious day walking around in Belgrade. Yet our man had touched on a vital subject.
Gracefulness. Porn stars are not supposed to have that quality. They, the descendants of the whores of the ancient brothels, should have a knowing smile, heavy, languid eyelids, massive, well oiled, breasts and buttocks. Their sexuality may be that of the horny farm girls they sometimes were, a few years before, if that simple, humorous randiness has survived the years in the brothel, or it could be the raunchy desire of the frustrated housewife ( One of the Roman satirists, I think it is Juvenal, wrote of the wife of one of the Emperors, one of the Virtuous Five, and he alleged that she, driven desperate by his sober lifestyle, spent all her nights in a cheap brothel, to be ridden upon by soldiers and merchants, only reluctantly leaving her smelly couch at the crack of dawn to return to her palace. Our tabloids sin by their hysterical industriousness, smashing their preys to pulp in Parisian tunnels. They lack the flights of fancy of their ancestors) , or it could be , as it probably is most of the time, a quick affair of undressing and a few moans, for in the end, the performance of a tired soldier or a drunk merchant comes to a paltry few thrusts and the crux of the matter is in putting on a maternal, understanding face as the client pours his heart out on the pillow afterwards, telling tales of bad deals, unfair pay, shrewish wives and grasping cousins.
All this everyday sexuality is the bread and butter of the whore. But the sacred groves of gracefulness… which make the heart leap as it remembers the first stirrings of love, at fourteen. That holy vessel of humanity, the secret jars in which the beloved keeps the waters of childhood – when the Lord speaks to Job of His power, He asks him: Do you know where I keep the great jars of the rain ? And the Muslims say that on the great night where the Prophet rode to Heaven on the mare Borak, the water in the jars becomes sweet ; isn’t the epitome of gracefulness the image of a woman carrying a jar back from the river, either on the side of her waist, or on her head ? Gracefulness finds its source in childhood because at its very heart lies a subtle gaucheness, a slight awkwardness of the wrist, of the hip, a tilt of the head, a hesitation, a shy withdrawal. Woman’s gracefulness is not the same as that of the snake or the leopard. Theirs is surer, more lethal. It may approach it, to the delight of the erotomaniac, but if it becomes completely like theirs, then it is deadly, to the further delight of said erotomaniac, because if he goes to the end of his cravings, then he wishes death (1) .
Baudelaire spoke of “les verts paradis des amours enfantines” in Moesta et Errabunda :
Mais le vert paradis des amours enfantines,
Les courses, les chansons, les baisers, les bouquets,
Les violons vibrant derrière les collines,
Avec les brocs de vin, le soir, dans les bosquets,
— Mais le vert paradis des amours enfantines,
L'innocent paradis, plein de plaisirs furtifs,
Est-il déjà plus loin que l'Inde et que la Chine?
Peut-on le rappeler avec des cris plaintifs,
Et l'animer encor d'une voix argentine,
L'innocent paradis plein de plaisirs furtifs?
At 13, a girl does not ( normally) have big breasts or buttocks. She only has her gracefulness, her vivacity- O the crystalline loves of that time ! “L’innocent paradis, plein de plaisirs furtifs”. Blessed the woman who can keep something of that in her adult years.
How odd that our Maria should spoil the water of her jars with the oil of the whore, the oil in the hair of her trader client, the oil in the voice of the Madame – nowadays a porn film executive in pin stripe suits. Ah well, that’s the way the world goes.
(1) Snakes and leopards do not laugh, and if they did, they would not cover their mouths with their hands ( with their tails, probably, in the case of snakes). Real, through-and-through eroticism is a grave matter, something undertakers should do as a side business.
Why was I not informed about Nicolas Bouvier before ? How come I’d never heard of this man, and after a full thirty six years on this planet stumble like a fool on his collected works, which I pick up with a blasé face, only to discover a Maestro travel writer, like Luke Skywalker finding out that the dirty little creature who’se stealing his food rations is Yoda the Master. I fully share the feelings of Mr Sammy Potts in this remarkable article ( this boy is only twelve years old ? Such talent !) about his discovering Bruce Lee:
http://www.theonion.com/content/opinion/why_was_i_not_informed_about
Yet I had heard of Paul Theroux, I’ve read “The Songlines” by Bruce Chatwin, “Slowly down the Ganges” by Eric Newby, “Among the Believers” by VS Naipaul ( well I’ve read most of it and I find it interesting. Why do my Muslim friends dislike it so much ? It’s nowhere as harsh as “An Area of Darkness”). It’s true that I hadn’t paid much attention to the French tradition of travel writing, because the British school is so much more famous. I think it’s Eric Newby who said: “The French endure much hardship in the name of commerce, religion and empire. Only the British travel to get as far away as possible from their land”.
Anyway Nicolas Bouvier is ( was, actually- alas) not French, but Swiss, from that respectable Huguenot bourgeoisie which Jean Cohen skewered in “Belle du Seigneur”. He grew up in a highly cultivated, but rather stuffy family ( How fortunate for us. Would he, at the age of eight have traced the course of the Yukon on the butter of his toast, as he did, if his parents had been anarcho-syndicalists living in a cellar in Barcelona ? Even the Lord needed a Judas to be there to accomplish his destiny. Did Judas have a choice ? Borges has made some dizzying hypotheses on this topic. But I digress) and at the tender age of twenty and three, did set on the road in a Fiat Topolino. Beforehand, he had dismantled it into its six thousand ( eight thousand according to another of his essays. But after one hundred nobody can count, unless you’ve got pointed ears and are the resident bore in an adventurous spacecraft) spare parts, and reassembled it, like a giant Mecano. Here, already , my envy starts for I am afflicted with two left hands, as the French say. But my envy has ample reason to puff and puff as I keep reading his adventures, until it bursts and I bend both knees, acknowledging him to be a true Master.
Let’s , for the sake of economy, bypass the ample matter of his mental and physical courage ( the fevers, the meager lifestyle, the terrible loneliness of his seven months in Sri Lanka. Along his travels, he writes articles for local magazines, thereby getting just enough money to survive for the next few weeks. The prospect of real starvation in Japan makes an art photographer out of him). Other people could have endured as much, but not become great writers. Not him. The characters he describes while on the road have an immediacy, a powerful presence such that you have the impression they are right next to your armchair. His style is limpid and precise, the images tumble on after the other as if, on a return from Bali, a playful uncle had lifted a suitcase and opening it wide, had let its cloth and trinkets tumble down in front of marvelling nieces and nephews, while the smell from there fills the room.
Of course, it’s not just cute exoticism. Whether in Yugoslavia, Iran, Korea or Japan, Nicolas Bouvier describes plenty of sharp misery. I particularly remember his poignant lines about the Japanese fondness for photographs ( sorry for the very imprecise translation, from memory): “It was an avidity to capture the few joyful moments in life.Wherever I would enter a house, I would be given first of all photo albums and looking at them, I learned more about the country than by going to a hundred art photography exhibitions. Gazing at the endless pictures of big eyed children under their school caps, I came upon a frugal, introverted and pathetic Japan which tourist brochures do not speak of”. Same could apply for China. I guess that like karaoke, photographs are a means of effusion for the stoic people of East Asia.
Nicolas Bouvier deeply empathises with the people he comes across in his travels. Wherever he meets awful setbacks, the smallest of which would have sent Naipaul musing about “sense of loss” and “sense of decay”, his immense patience and superb sense of humour lifts him to a joyous sympathy, like the ideal drinking companion to have at the bar after a bad day. I love the first page of his travel notes on Tabriz ( sorry for the very imprecise translation, made from memory):
“Travelling is full of surprises. After having breezed through Anatolia in three days, one arrives in Tabriz, in Northern Iran. There, while one is spending one’s first evening in a bar with an apatrid doctor, the night falls, and with it, the snow, which covers the roads further East. One ends up spending seven months there. Yet Tabriz was controlled to the military, and getting a residence permit is not easy. The apatrid doctor sent us to an officer whom he had cured from a tumour. The man had been trained in the Prussian military tradition and his interrogation was sharp, severe, impeccable. Yet , a few days later, his demeanour had changed. With a loving gaze, he told us that we had been granted the permits, and, blushing to the roots of his hair, he mumbled: “I have just spent two hours in the mosque, praying that we could become close, very close friends”. His wishes were not granted for a few days later he was transferred. The best laid plans of mice and men… “Had you noticed their swarthy yet rosy cheekbones ?” said Thierry [ Nicolas’ travelling companion] Yes, but my mind had been stunned by something else – what a Lord in Heaven [ Quel Bon Dieu – untranslatable], to whom one could ask everything”
The dark spot of his travels – from Switzerland to Yugoslavia, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Japan – is his seven months in Sri Lanka where, tortured by fever and loneliness, he scrapes past madness. I don’t know what to make of his alleged conversations with the ghost of a Jesuit who helps him with his articles in English for a Sri Lankan literary magazine. Is it an elaborate joke ? He describes the meetings in the same precise manner as when he writes of the great battle between an anthill and a termite nest in the courtyard of his inn. What about his seeing a goblin arise with a thunderous sound from the ground between his feet, to serve himself with a pickle jar, which the shopkeeper puts in her books in the credit accounts just like for any other customer ? And the swirling ectoplasm which arises in the shop of a watch repairer, only to be chased by a sleepy exorcist armed with a banana leaf?
Whatever it was, it was time for him to escape by way of a cruise ship, in which he was a lowly dishwasher, to Japan, which he loved to the point where he returned there twice, the second time with his wife ( A beautiful woman. Such a man deserved that. They can’t all end up with real estate tycoons).
In his later life, he was an iconographer, and has written several interesting articles on images, which I have yet to finish reading. In one of the few I’ve already read, he tells of the two pictures he keeps pinned on the wall in front of him. One is of a man with a donkey head, to remind himself of his “stupidity” ( this man is an erudite, but one of those about whom it is said: the pedant carries his learning like a man walking with a ladder through a crowd. The wise man carries his like a bunch of balloons). The other is a Japanese print of ghastly beauty, showing the face of a dead woman on whose lips a lizard rears its head. The woman’s face is contorted, yet a “malefic beauty” as he says, emanates from her fine, snowy features and the lizard’s supple, electric presence tells of the persistence of life.
He loved donkeys because he considered their endurance and quiet ability to be the marks of the good traveller. Nicolas Bouvier died in 1998 and in belated hommage to him, I reproduce here a poem which he liked, and to which I also am very much attached, Francis Jammes’ Prière pour aller au Paradis avec les Anes:
Lorsqu ' il faudra aller vers Vous, ô mon Dieu, faites
que ce soit par un jour où la campagne en fête
poudroiera. Je désire, ainsi que je fis ici-bas,
choisir un chemin pour aller,
comme il me plaira,
au Paradis, où sont en plein jour les étoiles.
Je prendrai mon bâton et sur la grande route
j'irai, et je dirai aux ânes, mes amis :
Je suis Francis Jammes et je vais au paradis,
car il n'y a pas d'enfer au pays du Bon Dieu.
Je leur dirai : Venez, doux amis du ciel bleu,
pauvres bêtes chéries qui,
d'un brusque mouvement d'oreille,
chassez les mouches plates, les coups
et les abeilles...
Que je Vous apparaisse au milieu de ces bêtes
Que j'aime tant parce qu'elles baissent la tête
doucement, et s'arrêtent en joignant leurs petits
pieds
d'une façon bien douce et qui vous fait pitié.
J'arriverai suivi de leurs milliers d'oreilles,
suivis de ceux qui portèrent au flanc
des corbeilles,
de ceux traînant des voitures de saltimbanques
ou des voitures de plumeaux et de fer-blanc,
de ceux qui ont au dos des bidons bossués,
des ânesses pleines comme des outres, aux pas
cassés,
de ceux à qui l'on met de petits pantalons
à cause des plaies bleues et suintantes que font
les mouches entêtées qui s'y groupent en rond.
Mon Dieu faites qu'avec ces ânes je Vous vienne.
Faites que, dans la paix, des anges nous
conduisent
vers des ruisseaux touffus où tremblent
des cerises
lisses comme la chair qui rit des jeunes filles,
et faites que, penché dans ce séjour des âmes,
sur Vos divines eaux je sois pareil aux ânes
qui mireront leur humble et douce pauvreté
à la limpidité de l'amour éternel
http://www.theonion.com/content/opinion/why_was_i_not_informed_about
Yet I had heard of Paul Theroux, I’ve read “The Songlines” by Bruce Chatwin, “Slowly down the Ganges” by Eric Newby, “Among the Believers” by VS Naipaul ( well I’ve read most of it and I find it interesting. Why do my Muslim friends dislike it so much ? It’s nowhere as harsh as “An Area of Darkness”). It’s true that I hadn’t paid much attention to the French tradition of travel writing, because the British school is so much more famous. I think it’s Eric Newby who said: “The French endure much hardship in the name of commerce, religion and empire. Only the British travel to get as far away as possible from their land”.
Anyway Nicolas Bouvier is ( was, actually- alas) not French, but Swiss, from that respectable Huguenot bourgeoisie which Jean Cohen skewered in “Belle du Seigneur”. He grew up in a highly cultivated, but rather stuffy family ( How fortunate for us. Would he, at the age of eight have traced the course of the Yukon on the butter of his toast, as he did, if his parents had been anarcho-syndicalists living in a cellar in Barcelona ? Even the Lord needed a Judas to be there to accomplish his destiny. Did Judas have a choice ? Borges has made some dizzying hypotheses on this topic. But I digress) and at the tender age of twenty and three, did set on the road in a Fiat Topolino. Beforehand, he had dismantled it into its six thousand ( eight thousand according to another of his essays. But after one hundred nobody can count, unless you’ve got pointed ears and are the resident bore in an adventurous spacecraft) spare parts, and reassembled it, like a giant Mecano. Here, already , my envy starts for I am afflicted with two left hands, as the French say. But my envy has ample reason to puff and puff as I keep reading his adventures, until it bursts and I bend both knees, acknowledging him to be a true Master.
Let’s , for the sake of economy, bypass the ample matter of his mental and physical courage ( the fevers, the meager lifestyle, the terrible loneliness of his seven months in Sri Lanka. Along his travels, he writes articles for local magazines, thereby getting just enough money to survive for the next few weeks. The prospect of real starvation in Japan makes an art photographer out of him). Other people could have endured as much, but not become great writers. Not him. The characters he describes while on the road have an immediacy, a powerful presence such that you have the impression they are right next to your armchair. His style is limpid and precise, the images tumble on after the other as if, on a return from Bali, a playful uncle had lifted a suitcase and opening it wide, had let its cloth and trinkets tumble down in front of marvelling nieces and nephews, while the smell from there fills the room.
Of course, it’s not just cute exoticism. Whether in Yugoslavia, Iran, Korea or Japan, Nicolas Bouvier describes plenty of sharp misery. I particularly remember his poignant lines about the Japanese fondness for photographs ( sorry for the very imprecise translation, from memory): “It was an avidity to capture the few joyful moments in life.Wherever I would enter a house, I would be given first of all photo albums and looking at them, I learned more about the country than by going to a hundred art photography exhibitions. Gazing at the endless pictures of big eyed children under their school caps, I came upon a frugal, introverted and pathetic Japan which tourist brochures do not speak of”. Same could apply for China. I guess that like karaoke, photographs are a means of effusion for the stoic people of East Asia.
Nicolas Bouvier deeply empathises with the people he comes across in his travels. Wherever he meets awful setbacks, the smallest of which would have sent Naipaul musing about “sense of loss” and “sense of decay”, his immense patience and superb sense of humour lifts him to a joyous sympathy, like the ideal drinking companion to have at the bar after a bad day. I love the first page of his travel notes on Tabriz ( sorry for the very imprecise translation, made from memory):
“Travelling is full of surprises. After having breezed through Anatolia in three days, one arrives in Tabriz, in Northern Iran. There, while one is spending one’s first evening in a bar with an apatrid doctor, the night falls, and with it, the snow, which covers the roads further East. One ends up spending seven months there. Yet Tabriz was controlled to the military, and getting a residence permit is not easy. The apatrid doctor sent us to an officer whom he had cured from a tumour. The man had been trained in the Prussian military tradition and his interrogation was sharp, severe, impeccable. Yet , a few days later, his demeanour had changed. With a loving gaze, he told us that we had been granted the permits, and, blushing to the roots of his hair, he mumbled: “I have just spent two hours in the mosque, praying that we could become close, very close friends”. His wishes were not granted for a few days later he was transferred. The best laid plans of mice and men… “Had you noticed their swarthy yet rosy cheekbones ?” said Thierry [ Nicolas’ travelling companion] Yes, but my mind had been stunned by something else – what a Lord in Heaven [ Quel Bon Dieu – untranslatable], to whom one could ask everything”
The dark spot of his travels – from Switzerland to Yugoslavia, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Japan – is his seven months in Sri Lanka where, tortured by fever and loneliness, he scrapes past madness. I don’t know what to make of his alleged conversations with the ghost of a Jesuit who helps him with his articles in English for a Sri Lankan literary magazine. Is it an elaborate joke ? He describes the meetings in the same precise manner as when he writes of the great battle between an anthill and a termite nest in the courtyard of his inn. What about his seeing a goblin arise with a thunderous sound from the ground between his feet, to serve himself with a pickle jar, which the shopkeeper puts in her books in the credit accounts just like for any other customer ? And the swirling ectoplasm which arises in the shop of a watch repairer, only to be chased by a sleepy exorcist armed with a banana leaf?
Whatever it was, it was time for him to escape by way of a cruise ship, in which he was a lowly dishwasher, to Japan, which he loved to the point where he returned there twice, the second time with his wife ( A beautiful woman. Such a man deserved that. They can’t all end up with real estate tycoons).
In his later life, he was an iconographer, and has written several interesting articles on images, which I have yet to finish reading. In one of the few I’ve already read, he tells of the two pictures he keeps pinned on the wall in front of him. One is of a man with a donkey head, to remind himself of his “stupidity” ( this man is an erudite, but one of those about whom it is said: the pedant carries his learning like a man walking with a ladder through a crowd. The wise man carries his like a bunch of balloons). The other is a Japanese print of ghastly beauty, showing the face of a dead woman on whose lips a lizard rears its head. The woman’s face is contorted, yet a “malefic beauty” as he says, emanates from her fine, snowy features and the lizard’s supple, electric presence tells of the persistence of life.
He loved donkeys because he considered their endurance and quiet ability to be the marks of the good traveller. Nicolas Bouvier died in 1998 and in belated hommage to him, I reproduce here a poem which he liked, and to which I also am very much attached, Francis Jammes’ Prière pour aller au Paradis avec les Anes:
Lorsqu ' il faudra aller vers Vous, ô mon Dieu, faites
que ce soit par un jour où la campagne en fête
poudroiera. Je désire, ainsi que je fis ici-bas,
choisir un chemin pour aller,
comme il me plaira,
au Paradis, où sont en plein jour les étoiles.
Je prendrai mon bâton et sur la grande route
j'irai, et je dirai aux ânes, mes amis :
Je suis Francis Jammes et je vais au paradis,
car il n'y a pas d'enfer au pays du Bon Dieu.
Je leur dirai : Venez, doux amis du ciel bleu,
pauvres bêtes chéries qui,
d'un brusque mouvement d'oreille,
chassez les mouches plates, les coups
et les abeilles...
Que je Vous apparaisse au milieu de ces bêtes
Que j'aime tant parce qu'elles baissent la tête
doucement, et s'arrêtent en joignant leurs petits
pieds
d'une façon bien douce et qui vous fait pitié.
J'arriverai suivi de leurs milliers d'oreilles,
suivis de ceux qui portèrent au flanc
des corbeilles,
de ceux traînant des voitures de saltimbanques
ou des voitures de plumeaux et de fer-blanc,
de ceux qui ont au dos des bidons bossués,
des ânesses pleines comme des outres, aux pas
cassés,
de ceux à qui l'on met de petits pantalons
à cause des plaies bleues et suintantes que font
les mouches entêtées qui s'y groupent en rond.
Mon Dieu faites qu'avec ces ânes je Vous vienne.
Faites que, dans la paix, des anges nous
conduisent
vers des ruisseaux touffus où tremblent
des cerises
lisses comme la chair qui rit des jeunes filles,
et faites que, penché dans ce séjour des âmes,
sur Vos divines eaux je sois pareil aux ânes
qui mireront leur humble et douce pauvreté
à la limpidité de l'amour éternel
Friday, July 06, 2007
If liberal democracy is the form of government best suited to our nature, why are our fantasies so feodal ? The very name “fantasy literature” evokes the image of Conan the barbarian. When we go to Paris, we visit Versailles, not the buildings of La Défense, which are supposed to be great works of modern architecture. It is always the same whenever one goes on a tourist trip: visits to temples and palaces.Of course it is because they are beautiful. But why can’t modern societies, which are immensely richer and more clever than the ones they’ve replaced, construct buildings which would fire our imagination to the same extent ? The words “palace” or “mosque” evoke worlds which we find evocative. The aspirations of those who had them built were grand : to evoke power and splendour, or to commune with God. In our age, the people hold power, and their aspirations are more humble: better schools, better hospitals. The 18th century philosophers who dreamed of an Age of Reason would be surprised, though , if they could see how much remains of the old society. In many democracies, the Head of State is still a monarch, and I suspect that things are even worse in presidential regimes, in that a crushing mantle falls on the shoulders of the elected one. A French president is not just supposed to be an able statesman. He has to possess an almost gloomy grandeur. No one expected De Gaulle or Mitterand to smile or hug babies. American presidents do that, but I think that it is part of that fluffy, just-call-me-Andy exterior of American society. America as a whole seems to me ( I’ve never been there) a profoundly serious, hardworking society. American presidents can play the saxophone as much as they want, but there is a kind of expectation of superhuman faculties made on them. Not only are they supposed to be superior strategists and economists, but they have to radiate a certain “enhanced” normality, a sort of heroism at rest. I suspect that Americans go to war from time to time only to produce future presidents.
The other great , or not so great maybe, survivor of the old society is religion. It is doing surprisingly well. The one we hear most about these days is Islam. A Muslim friend of mine has explained to me that much of the present troubles of Islam with the modern world comes from the fact that Islam has a more complete tool box than other religions: not only does it have a spiritual dimension, but a legal corpus, the Sharia. In Christianity, Pope and Emperor fought for temporal power, but neither Jesus nor Paul bothered much about inheritance law and the penal code . Hinduism’s laws of Manu are so laughably unfair ( for the same offence , the penalty varies according to the caste) as to make them an embarassment. This means that however much Evangelical Christians and the Hindutva crowd may dream of their respective Golden Ages, the picture they have of that time is blurred. For Evangelicals, the blessed age was that of the first Christians, but the latter were not a ruling group, but a persecuted minority. I guess that is why the Evangelicals love going to the most hostile country possible – Afghanistan ! Iraq ! - to spread the Holy Word. The Hindutva fantasy is a bizzare mixture of antiquity and science fiction in which ancient Indians threw atomic missiles at each other ( if the ancient Indians were so advanced, they must also have been the most ecologically correct civilisation the world has ever known, because no trace remains of their advanced industry).
With Islam, on the other hand, Golden Age reconstructionists get a pretty awesome toolbox. Not only is there the Sharia, which gives them a legal code, but there is the military glamour of the times of the Four Rightly Guided Caliphs, whose armies defeated vastly superior foes, and conquered immense territories, at a miraculous speed. However great this tool box may be, however, it still misses a vital element ( which cannot be found, actually, on this earth): an example of a perfect Islamic state which would be a viable model for today’s society. The society of 6th century Arabia is so remotely unlike ours that even when the Talibans tried to make an extremely poor and traditional country like Afghanistan look like the Arabia of those days, the attempt still took on a ludicrous turn. They ended up depriving the common people of the little technology that was available, while they themselves maintained a website and operated sophisticated weapons.
Why is it that, while living in the modern world, so many of our dreams take on such an archaic turn ? Many of the archetypes we have of role models have a medieval touch. For men, the main types are: the Hero, the King, the Wise Man/Wizard, the Father, the Clown/Madman/ Wise Fool. These are the figures of Mythology. When we progress to Tales, we can have, in addition to the figures of Mythology, lesser types such as the Evil Sorcerer and the Traitor. From then on, we go to modern literature, where even lesser figures start emerging, which do not even deserve capital letters: the tradesman, the peasant, the small town doctor, the lover, the picaresque adventurer and so on. For women, the declension is a bit more complicated. We have in Mythology: the Hero’s Beloved, the Queen, the Wise Woman/Witch, the Mother. Then to tales, where we also have the Evil Sorceress, the Evil Stepmother, the Princess. Then on to literature with its Emmas and Tesses: this is where the declension is a bit complicated, because the figure of a woman as a main character in a story is a rather modern invention. In the case of male archetypes, the greatest, most exalted of all figures is the Hero. In the case of female archetypes, there used to be a bit of a lack of a corresponding figure. The Hero’s Beloved is a passive character. Strangely, the only female character in Mythology who can approximately match the Hero in terms of power, is the Wise Woman. Circe did give Ulysses a fright, before falling in love with him. When we climb down to Tales, women get a bit of a push up, and Cinderella and Snow White appear as heroines of their own stories. Then on to literature, where, over the centuries, the balance starts getting even. The great exception to all of this is Spiritual-Erotic Poetry, which belongs more to religion, anyway, and in which both Laila and Qais, both Krishna and Radha are exalted to the highest planes.
Thus we see that the more we go in the literary past, the larger the figures get, until by the time we reach Mythology, we are puny tourists at the feet of great Colossuses. The Hero is still exalted , but he has been going through a bit of strange times lately. With the tectonic plates between the continents of Man and Woman going through some rumbles in the past few centuries, as the two lands crash more and more into each other, our Hero’s statue is trembling on its pedestal. But that is another story. My point is that man is a dreamer, and that the more ancient of his dreams tend to take fantastic shapes in his mind, like the ruins of great cities he sees far away trembling in the desert light. Modern literary figures seem like flies compared to the likes of Hector. But that could be an effect of time. Shakespeare’s characters, as they acquire the patina of centuries, are starting to grow in our imagination - Romeo and Juliet, Falstaff, Hamlet….Will they , in the 25th century, acquire the stature of Ulysses ? Does the quasi-godlike stature of the latter give him an edge over the more human characters of literature ? Or, on the contrary, will that very humanity make literary characters more endearing to the people of the future ?
We see the world through myths. What has been mythified, exists. Paris, London, New York are overladen with myths, and therefore they “glow”, they radiate existence, and people are drawn to them like moths(1).
The act of writing mythifies existence. But will today’s writing , with its subtler characters, be able , in the future, to displace in our mental map, the more elemental figures of the past ? Ah well, I wish I was a Wise Man/ Sorcerer to be able to know that ! A related question is: in the future, will people know either about Ulysses or about Romeo ? Television and cinema’s characters, for all the virtues of these media, tend to have a more coarse-grained texture than those of literature. Especially with today’s cinema, which loves the likes of Leonidas and Legolas. But still, Michael in “The Godfather” is as Shakesperian a character as the bard himself ever invented. There is hope for literature, and for a humanisation of our deep brain.
(1) A people who are not written upon, cease to “exist”. In a famous black novel ( which I have not read), “Nobody knows my name”, one of the black characters exclaims “They do not see me!”. As a black in early 20th century America, he is a “problem” figure, and his only way of surviving would be to lie low. But nowadays, with the powerful influence of American black culture, he is very much “seen” ( especially on MTV). When Salman Rushdie wrote “Midnight’s Children”, an American critic said: “The literary map of India is about to be redrawn..” . We all carry such maps, which give coherence to the world and we need myths and stereotypes so as to draw them. Later, after having explored of one part of the map, we can say: “Oh but it is much more complicated than what I thought..” but still, that first sketchy coastal outline was needed, as a landing point.
Myths are stereotypes, racial and cultural, but stereotypes which have “bloomed”: clichés which are enlarged into a wider corpus. There is a vast body of idées reçues about the French. There are, on the other hand, only very little things which the Nyamwezi, in Mozambique, evoke to us. If we have to imagine their lives,we can only borrow some images from our mental archives, at the rubric “tribal people”, and therefore visualise them as living in little round huts, the men going hunting, and the women planting grains. The French, therefore, are a “mythified” people, while the Nyamwezi only “possess” some stereotypes.
The other great , or not so great maybe, survivor of the old society is religion. It is doing surprisingly well. The one we hear most about these days is Islam. A Muslim friend of mine has explained to me that much of the present troubles of Islam with the modern world comes from the fact that Islam has a more complete tool box than other religions: not only does it have a spiritual dimension, but a legal corpus, the Sharia. In Christianity, Pope and Emperor fought for temporal power, but neither Jesus nor Paul bothered much about inheritance law and the penal code . Hinduism’s laws of Manu are so laughably unfair ( for the same offence , the penalty varies according to the caste) as to make them an embarassment. This means that however much Evangelical Christians and the Hindutva crowd may dream of their respective Golden Ages, the picture they have of that time is blurred. For Evangelicals, the blessed age was that of the first Christians, but the latter were not a ruling group, but a persecuted minority. I guess that is why the Evangelicals love going to the most hostile country possible – Afghanistan ! Iraq ! - to spread the Holy Word. The Hindutva fantasy is a bizzare mixture of antiquity and science fiction in which ancient Indians threw atomic missiles at each other ( if the ancient Indians were so advanced, they must also have been the most ecologically correct civilisation the world has ever known, because no trace remains of their advanced industry).
With Islam, on the other hand, Golden Age reconstructionists get a pretty awesome toolbox. Not only is there the Sharia, which gives them a legal code, but there is the military glamour of the times of the Four Rightly Guided Caliphs, whose armies defeated vastly superior foes, and conquered immense territories, at a miraculous speed. However great this tool box may be, however, it still misses a vital element ( which cannot be found, actually, on this earth): an example of a perfect Islamic state which would be a viable model for today’s society. The society of 6th century Arabia is so remotely unlike ours that even when the Talibans tried to make an extremely poor and traditional country like Afghanistan look like the Arabia of those days, the attempt still took on a ludicrous turn. They ended up depriving the common people of the little technology that was available, while they themselves maintained a website and operated sophisticated weapons.
Why is it that, while living in the modern world, so many of our dreams take on such an archaic turn ? Many of the archetypes we have of role models have a medieval touch. For men, the main types are: the Hero, the King, the Wise Man/Wizard, the Father, the Clown/Madman/ Wise Fool. These are the figures of Mythology. When we progress to Tales, we can have, in addition to the figures of Mythology, lesser types such as the Evil Sorcerer and the Traitor. From then on, we go to modern literature, where even lesser figures start emerging, which do not even deserve capital letters: the tradesman, the peasant, the small town doctor, the lover, the picaresque adventurer and so on. For women, the declension is a bit more complicated. We have in Mythology: the Hero’s Beloved, the Queen, the Wise Woman/Witch, the Mother. Then to tales, where we also have the Evil Sorceress, the Evil Stepmother, the Princess. Then on to literature with its Emmas and Tesses: this is where the declension is a bit complicated, because the figure of a woman as a main character in a story is a rather modern invention. In the case of male archetypes, the greatest, most exalted of all figures is the Hero. In the case of female archetypes, there used to be a bit of a lack of a corresponding figure. The Hero’s Beloved is a passive character. Strangely, the only female character in Mythology who can approximately match the Hero in terms of power, is the Wise Woman. Circe did give Ulysses a fright, before falling in love with him. When we climb down to Tales, women get a bit of a push up, and Cinderella and Snow White appear as heroines of their own stories. Then on to literature, where, over the centuries, the balance starts getting even. The great exception to all of this is Spiritual-Erotic Poetry, which belongs more to religion, anyway, and in which both Laila and Qais, both Krishna and Radha are exalted to the highest planes.
Thus we see that the more we go in the literary past, the larger the figures get, until by the time we reach Mythology, we are puny tourists at the feet of great Colossuses. The Hero is still exalted , but he has been going through a bit of strange times lately. With the tectonic plates between the continents of Man and Woman going through some rumbles in the past few centuries, as the two lands crash more and more into each other, our Hero’s statue is trembling on its pedestal. But that is another story. My point is that man is a dreamer, and that the more ancient of his dreams tend to take fantastic shapes in his mind, like the ruins of great cities he sees far away trembling in the desert light. Modern literary figures seem like flies compared to the likes of Hector. But that could be an effect of time. Shakespeare’s characters, as they acquire the patina of centuries, are starting to grow in our imagination - Romeo and Juliet, Falstaff, Hamlet….Will they , in the 25th century, acquire the stature of Ulysses ? Does the quasi-godlike stature of the latter give him an edge over the more human characters of literature ? Or, on the contrary, will that very humanity make literary characters more endearing to the people of the future ?
We see the world through myths. What has been mythified, exists. Paris, London, New York are overladen with myths, and therefore they “glow”, they radiate existence, and people are drawn to them like moths(1).
The act of writing mythifies existence. But will today’s writing , with its subtler characters, be able , in the future, to displace in our mental map, the more elemental figures of the past ? Ah well, I wish I was a Wise Man/ Sorcerer to be able to know that ! A related question is: in the future, will people know either about Ulysses or about Romeo ? Television and cinema’s characters, for all the virtues of these media, tend to have a more coarse-grained texture than those of literature. Especially with today’s cinema, which loves the likes of Leonidas and Legolas. But still, Michael in “The Godfather” is as Shakesperian a character as the bard himself ever invented. There is hope for literature, and for a humanisation of our deep brain.
(1) A people who are not written upon, cease to “exist”. In a famous black novel ( which I have not read), “Nobody knows my name”, one of the black characters exclaims “They do not see me!”. As a black in early 20th century America, he is a “problem” figure, and his only way of surviving would be to lie low. But nowadays, with the powerful influence of American black culture, he is very much “seen” ( especially on MTV). When Salman Rushdie wrote “Midnight’s Children”, an American critic said: “The literary map of India is about to be redrawn..” . We all carry such maps, which give coherence to the world and we need myths and stereotypes so as to draw them. Later, after having explored of one part of the map, we can say: “Oh but it is much more complicated than what I thought..” but still, that first sketchy coastal outline was needed, as a landing point.
Myths are stereotypes, racial and cultural, but stereotypes which have “bloomed”: clichés which are enlarged into a wider corpus. There is a vast body of idées reçues about the French. There are, on the other hand, only very little things which the Nyamwezi, in Mozambique, evoke to us. If we have to imagine their lives,we can only borrow some images from our mental archives, at the rubric “tribal people”, and therefore visualise them as living in little round huts, the men going hunting, and the women planting grains. The French, therefore, are a “mythified” people, while the Nyamwezi only “possess” some stereotypes.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
It was very interesting , yesterday at the movies, to see Beyoncé as a normal person in “Dreamgirls”. By a normal person, I mean someone who…just happened to be someone. I tend to think of her, and the other people who haunt the whereabouts of MTV as “possessed” people. I mean, the video clips you see in MTV nowadays are so saturated with sex that I end up seeing the dancers and singers as the distant heirs of the sacred prostitutes of the temples of classical India. People possessed by sex. My readers ( non-existent , but I still feel the need to believe I am writing to someone) will see me as obsessed with sacredness, given that two posts before, I had been writing about the sacredness of money in modern life. Maybe that, sacredness is something separate from God. Even when society does away with God, as it has done in our secular times, sacredness still survives, and grafts itself to our other pursuits – fucking, shopping.
Consider the great commercial centres of our times. When you go in, as you will do on every other Saturday, you will first see great banners whereon are printed the photographs of supermodels. This is the ground floor, on which, more often than not, are found the booths selling perfumes and jewelry. Hommages to the body, and the body’s power is proclaimed in these great photos of beautiful people. Lesser pursuits are attended to in the upper floors – clothes, to be worn when one is not having sex, furniture, stuff for children…but first the perfuming and adorning of the body. Are not our times the Days of the Whore ? Not that I am against Her Power, though I’ve never slept with one, if my readers will pardon me for that ( which I doubt). Those great photos of models, everywhere, are they not sacred objects , Signs of our Times ? Ideals, which few among us can attain ( certainly not me, with my flab and my fondness for beer. I am a low caste of my times ). I tend to lower my head in reverence, when I enter a commercial centre.
Consider the great commercial centres of our times. When you go in, as you will do on every other Saturday, you will first see great banners whereon are printed the photographs of supermodels. This is the ground floor, on which, more often than not, are found the booths selling perfumes and jewelry. Hommages to the body, and the body’s power is proclaimed in these great photos of beautiful people. Lesser pursuits are attended to in the upper floors – clothes, to be worn when one is not having sex, furniture, stuff for children…but first the perfuming and adorning of the body. Are not our times the Days of the Whore ? Not that I am against Her Power, though I’ve never slept with one, if my readers will pardon me for that ( which I doubt). Those great photos of models, everywhere, are they not sacred objects , Signs of our Times ? Ideals, which few among us can attain ( certainly not me, with my flab and my fondness for beer. I am a low caste of my times ). I tend to lower my head in reverence, when I enter a commercial centre.
Sometimes I have these fantasies of myself as someone who is immensely involved in sex. Like Graham Greene, who at one point in his life had a notebook with the address of around fourty prostitutes. I had a friend who was liked by women – once, I introduced him to a pretty real estate agent, and in my presence, they had the most innocent of conversations. The next day, the woman phoned him and , in passing, he told her he had a cold. She sent him a big bouquet with a “Get well” card. In “White Teeth” Zadie Smith says, about Salim ( I think that’s his name), the handsome teenager: “He was one of those people who radiated sexuality. He would enter a crowded pub, and from the very back, a woman would elbow her way to the bar, to offer him a drink”. My friend was like that. Once, I saw him try his best to seduce a woman – a very easy woman. He failed. She liked him, but for a professional reason, could not go out with him. What I mean, is that he did not have some special technique – I don’t think that exists. He simply was someone women liked to be with. You could not pin it down to any particular reason, I don’t think it was because of his Oxford accent, nor because of his nice clothes, nor because of the fact that he was a womanizer ( a fact which, paradoxically, attracts many women). These were add-ons , bonus points, on a core of sexiness which attracted them. He himself , obviously, would have refuted the idea that he simply happened to be someone whom women liked, and attributed his success to his efforts. At one point, when he was in France, he used to suscribe to three magazines: Men’s Health, which he described as an excellent magazine, Union, a kind of very French porn magazine, in that it had literary and scientific ambitions beyond its fleshpot nature, and Marie Claire, a solid, no –nonsense middle class women’s magazine. “Marie Claire women are my hunting ground” he explained to me. “The Vogue and Cosmo crowd are either too rich, or too wannabe rich for me”. So, he read his Marie Claire every month as an intelligence gathering activity on his prey. It reminded me of Holly Golightly in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” keeping newspaper cutouts of articles on baseball because it was good conversation material with men. Come to think of it, I will allow to him the fact that there were two factors at work: he was a sexy guy, but he also worked on it. He liked women, but then at fifteen, who doesn’t , unless you’re gay ( nothing insulting meant to gay people). Then he realised that he was successful with women, and he started to work on himself, rounding the corners, shaving off the rough edges. And obviously, became marginally more successful at it. Marginally, because in the end, it’s the other side which really decides. I guess we all start like him at fifteen, desperate, but so desperate that it aches, to get laid. He had the right ticket, was on the good wave, and he surfed…. But is that the whole story ? Do guys really like women ? Like most men, he would have been profoundly offended to be called a womanizer. It is a survival of childhood. Boys says: “Girls, buuuuuuuhhhh. Sissies. They cry for nothing”. It’s something more than that. Boys want to be heroes. The fact that women fall on their scarred bloody chests, wipe their sweaty foreheads is a bonus point, to which they are supposed to barely pay attention. A guy shouldn’t suscribe to Marie Claire. He may read Union, or Playboy or whatever in the company of other snickering comrades. He will, in a guilty way, flip the pages of Men’s health at the supermarket, to know stuff about diabetes, cholesterol and how to please a woman. But generally, he believes himself to be invincible. His body can, of course, withstand gigantic amounts of drinking, smoking and bad food. Coz he’s a guy , godammit. He will wear the same clothes for thousands of years, until they fall from his shoulders. It doesn’t matter. A concerned woman WILL come and buy him new ones because she SAW the glint in his eyes which said that he’s a MAN who’s been through STUFF. Women are just supposed to HAPPEN, beautiful walkyries who give you rich pussy after your BATTLE. You’re not supposed to RUN after them. So, all that makes me wonder about my friend. How come he admitted to me that he suscribed to Marie Claire ? He was nearing fifty at the time. Maybe, in some way, he was admitting, to the particularly young and harmless looking guy I maybe have looked at the time ( though I wonder whether I could have looked harmless at any point in my life. I usually look like a bum, walking on the streets, mentally arguing to myself, or else I look like a suicide bomber. I have a very Muslim look, much more Muslim than my Muslim friends) that the great success of his life was that he had been through a lot of pussy. An indirect admission, in old age, of failure – so masculine, in a way, maybe that’s what drew him to it. Look, that’s all I ever been able to do in my life. Accept me for what I am, I did not die in the mud from a gangrene infested wound, like I should have.
Shouldn’t we come back to me ? This is MY blog, goddamit, for my self glorification. It is my tiny slot of intellectual masturbation, granted to me by the American Department of Defence, the Jehovah of the web, which has probably taken note of of my Muslim look ( but I don’t care. I’m a GUY, remember ? Bullets bounce off my chest. My bullets rip through the bodies of six baddies. Their bullets, although they’re twenty around me, all miss me, like Arnie in “Commando”). Well, what about me ? I don’t know. My friend has hogged the whole blog post, warts and all, he was an elder male, a guy who’se been through nearly sixty years of livin’….I can feel around me my women colleagues and friends, asking me his phone number…but anyway, despite everything, let’s return to the topic of myself. I was saying….that I sometimes imagine myself as someone immersed in sex, someone who really loves it, works on it, devotes himself to it, and does it well. Now , sex is something, according to the Sacred Book of Manhood, is not something which a man is supposed to pay attention to. It is ( remember that bit ?) supposed to HAPPEN. And when it does, you do it well, with effortless ease, then lay on your back, light up a fag, and say ( if you speak French): “Alors, heureuse ?” ( untranslatable. Something like: ( said in a detached manner: “So, happy ?”). Gosh, the fucking DEMANDS which are made on you as a man. But at least it’s less ridiculous than being a modern woman. FUCKING SHIT the demands on a modern woman. The perfect body. The smart IQ. Successful at work. Successful lover. Successful housekeeper. Successful mother. Whore, caring mother, perfect host, smart at work. FUCK!!!!!! Thank God I’m a guy, even if bullets are supposed to bounce off my chest. In the end, there’s a charitable humour which is reserved for guys who fail in life, like most do. Men can be laughed at, for the pants which fall off their loins , for anything. For some reason I can’t fathom, at this point in my drunkenness, though it has helped me throughout this post ( praise be to the 200 Aztec gods of drunkenness) you give absurd standards to men, and then give them a laugh and a warm hug when they fail to reach it. You also give absurd standards to women, and give them a dry look when they fail to reach it. Life is an absurdly difficult game, which almost everyone fails, ( and you don’t really want to know about the ones who succeed, they probably shouldn’t wander in a dark alley, there would be a mob waiting for them with bricks and clubs ) but for some reason, men always have the consolation of the pub, this strange world where everyone is forgiven, as long as you can pay your drinks. For women there’s…..I don’t know. Watching all the seasons of “Sex and the City” and “Desperate Housewives” at one go, I guess.
FUCK. This post was supposed to be about me and my FANTASIES, or PHANTASIES, if you’re an old style anglophile, which I wish I had the power and priviledge to be. All right, I wasted it talking of my friend and his Marie Claire readings, which is in a way, a masculine endeavour ( you give your life to your buddy. Without thinking, you sprung out of your hole in the trenches and saved him, who had been hit in the leg by an evil cowardly sniper ( that necessity of DUMB, COWARDLY, SIMPLE EVIL in the masculine mind, women know so much more on that score, understand from early on that your worst enemy doesn't wear a hood, doesn't tie girls to railroad tracks, he is the nice guy at the office who always takes you to lunch). You got hit by three or four bullets, but you dragged him back. THAT NEED, TO HAVE THE HORNPIPE BLOWING AT YOUR FUNERAL AND A WEEPING WIDOW AND LITTLE JOHN JOHN WHO SALUTES YOU AS YOUR COFFIN GOES BY). John John , for my illiterate readers, refers to that photo of Kennedy’s son, John John ( I wonder whether Kennedy was really that smart, if he couldn’t think of a second Christian name for his son) giving the salute to this father’s coffin as it passed by, killed by that monument of American muddleheadedness, that guy, whatever was his name, who could shoot three or four perfect shots within a few seconds – I will not defile my drunkenness by remembering his name.
FUCK NUMBER TWO Can we come back to me ? Of course we can, but is it really worth it , after I have spoiled my carefully cultivated image of myself, first by invoking my friend, the Man who was liked by Women, despite his assiduous reading of Marie Claire ( women too, mind you, don’t like too much the idea of a guy who likes them too much, who reads their stuff, who actually PAYS TOO MUCH ATTENTION to them), second by mentioning Shafty, as his Navy colleagues used to call him, also known as John Fritzgerald Kennedy, who got laid by Holly Golilghtly, also known as Marylin Monroe, among others…after this, can I have some space in My blog for myself, please ?
Ok, I have been able to think of myself, again. It all started innocently, with that sentence, saying that I have sometimes have fantasies of myself being someone who is immensely involved in sex. Not, the reader will have understood from the above, in an ABSORBED way. A MAN can, if he wishes to, be intensely involved in sex , but he is supposed to be intellectually and emotionally DETACHED from it. The young ( of course, sexually attractive ) Sociology student asks him : “ What has been the frequency of your sexual activity since your wife went to China ?” He, ( despite his too many beers since his wife went away, he of course still has a flat belly) : “Well sometimes I … go to see … prostitutes” ( the scientific tone disculpates him). She ( wondering, of course, secretly sexually aroused) : “How many prostitutes have you slept with ?” He ( in a scientifically detached manner) : “Around 200. I don’t keep an exact count” “200 ? So many ?” ( That secret male desire : to IMPRESS). He, holding a beer bottle in his hands , detached, almost sad about it : “Yes, I think so” ….etc etc the reader can imagine the rest of the story. Of course she, the sociology student will sleep with him etc ( how could she not ?) . To repeat myself, my fantasy is to be involved in sex, yet to remain clean of the
STUFF that gets involved with it. It would be a sport exploit. Since my wife went to China, I would have slept with hundreds of prostitutes. My dick would be irreproachable, always answering the call of duty. Beyond the demands of these women, I would still have a lively interest in the women in the street, in the world of the web, thus manifesting an irreprochable manliness. Yet my soul would remain pure of the taint of sex. I would indulge in it with delight and perfect sportive performance. Yet I would remain a good boy, interested in higher pursuits. In the end, it is the dream of every man to be a perfect warrior, a perfect fucker, yet also be , beyond all this , a poet and a philosopher. The sensitive boy sissy, whose long hair we tugged at school , is , in some strange way, part of our masculine identity, the top of our edifice, while the bottom remains the rugged motherfucker who can fix the plumbing and give you a dirty joke and a prod in the ribs when you most need it.
Further thoughts ( I like the detached academic tone, which disculpates me from failure, because even if it is failure, it is one at a high –end level. O the masculine need to put one’s defeats at a high level, so that it gives the consolation of heroic death – the walkyries shall YET arrive, their rich moist pussies granting validation of manliness) : Oh gosh, I have forgotten. I have failed my first date, when the car should run smooth, when the restaurant should be perfect. Maculinity is the DEFEAT of the outside world, the saber-toothed tiger, the rundown car, the insolent waiter.Ah’m sorry, ah’ve forgotten what thought it was that I came upon while I went to pee ( peeing is an interesting no man’s land of gender. Some more liberated women friends of mine have no hesitation to say that they are going to pee. On the other hand, the very act of peeing marks a strong gender boundary. A woman has to hide behind a rock. A guy just walks back a few steps and turns his back. There’s a slight tinge of masculine power about the act, because it takes place through the penis, while defecation, an act which belongs to a much lower plane of being, is altogether another matter, wholly removed from sexuality. Peeing is a sort of very vague distant cousin of sex, an ugly mimic of it ). Ah’m sorry- it came to my mind, then it flipped its wings away ( the excuse of poetic language, when one has failed to perform the crude basic act. The flight to reassure the girl/woman that one’s poet ceiling exists, when her feet went through the plumber floor).
Sexuality is so funnily different, according to the sexes, with regard to class. A man feels the need to make a woman feel that he is a plumber who also ( but he’ll reveal that only bit by bit) happens to be a poet. A woman , on the other hand, feels the need to make her man understand that she’s a lady and then, reluctantly, she’ll slowly admit that she also happens to be a whore. Women start from the top , and work their way down. Men start from the bottom, and work their way up. But the bit of revelation is touchingly frightening for both. Men will admit , with some fright, that they are poets. Women will reluctantly admit that they are whores. The advantage belongs , I admit , to men : there is some glory in admitting that behind the plumber was also a poet, if one has been convincing about the plumbing bit. There is some letting down in admitting the whore bit, unless the man has been sufficiently touched by the lady part. Starting from the bottom is easier.
The masculine mistrust of women: the weeping widow afterwards went on to marry a Greek shipping tycoon. Women will not honour the poet in us, will not become sssshhhhhhhhhhhiiiiing librarians of our works .
The feminine mistrust of men…MEN. The resentment, so politically correct, even NECESSARY in our times, of men, in order to be a normal woman. For centuries before, a resentment against women, was politically correct, even NECESSARY, to be a normal man.Thus spins the wheel of fortune. The need to feel resentment against the weaker one: that eternal need of the dominant one. The slave owner NEEDS to resent the slave, for his feebleness, his cunning, his treachery. The master has the stronger vices, those of greater strength, of bullying. The slave has the weaker vices of duplicity.
I’m so sorry that I forgot what it was that I was thinking of while I went to pee. In my mind it has the ripe moist feel of unconquered pussy, of unkissed lips. High school love, who went out with someone else…
Shouldn’t we come back to me ? This is MY blog, goddamit, for my self glorification. It is my tiny slot of intellectual masturbation, granted to me by the American Department of Defence, the Jehovah of the web, which has probably taken note of of my Muslim look ( but I don’t care. I’m a GUY, remember ? Bullets bounce off my chest. My bullets rip through the bodies of six baddies. Their bullets, although they’re twenty around me, all miss me, like Arnie in “Commando”). Well, what about me ? I don’t know. My friend has hogged the whole blog post, warts and all, he was an elder male, a guy who’se been through nearly sixty years of livin’….I can feel around me my women colleagues and friends, asking me his phone number…but anyway, despite everything, let’s return to the topic of myself. I was saying….that I sometimes imagine myself as someone immersed in sex, someone who really loves it, works on it, devotes himself to it, and does it well. Now , sex is something, according to the Sacred Book of Manhood, is not something which a man is supposed to pay attention to. It is ( remember that bit ?) supposed to HAPPEN. And when it does, you do it well, with effortless ease, then lay on your back, light up a fag, and say ( if you speak French): “Alors, heureuse ?” ( untranslatable. Something like: ( said in a detached manner: “So, happy ?”). Gosh, the fucking DEMANDS which are made on you as a man. But at least it’s less ridiculous than being a modern woman. FUCKING SHIT the demands on a modern woman. The perfect body. The smart IQ. Successful at work. Successful lover. Successful housekeeper. Successful mother. Whore, caring mother, perfect host, smart at work. FUCK!!!!!! Thank God I’m a guy, even if bullets are supposed to bounce off my chest. In the end, there’s a charitable humour which is reserved for guys who fail in life, like most do. Men can be laughed at, for the pants which fall off their loins , for anything. For some reason I can’t fathom, at this point in my drunkenness, though it has helped me throughout this post ( praise be to the 200 Aztec gods of drunkenness) you give absurd standards to men, and then give them a laugh and a warm hug when they fail to reach it. You also give absurd standards to women, and give them a dry look when they fail to reach it. Life is an absurdly difficult game, which almost everyone fails, ( and you don’t really want to know about the ones who succeed, they probably shouldn’t wander in a dark alley, there would be a mob waiting for them with bricks and clubs ) but for some reason, men always have the consolation of the pub, this strange world where everyone is forgiven, as long as you can pay your drinks. For women there’s…..I don’t know. Watching all the seasons of “Sex and the City” and “Desperate Housewives” at one go, I guess.
FUCK. This post was supposed to be about me and my FANTASIES, or PHANTASIES, if you’re an old style anglophile, which I wish I had the power and priviledge to be. All right, I wasted it talking of my friend and his Marie Claire readings, which is in a way, a masculine endeavour ( you give your life to your buddy. Without thinking, you sprung out of your hole in the trenches and saved him, who had been hit in the leg by an evil cowardly sniper ( that necessity of DUMB, COWARDLY, SIMPLE EVIL in the masculine mind, women know so much more on that score, understand from early on that your worst enemy doesn't wear a hood, doesn't tie girls to railroad tracks, he is the nice guy at the office who always takes you to lunch). You got hit by three or four bullets, but you dragged him back. THAT NEED, TO HAVE THE HORNPIPE BLOWING AT YOUR FUNERAL AND A WEEPING WIDOW AND LITTLE JOHN JOHN WHO SALUTES YOU AS YOUR COFFIN GOES BY). John John , for my illiterate readers, refers to that photo of Kennedy’s son, John John ( I wonder whether Kennedy was really that smart, if he couldn’t think of a second Christian name for his son) giving the salute to this father’s coffin as it passed by, killed by that monument of American muddleheadedness, that guy, whatever was his name, who could shoot three or four perfect shots within a few seconds – I will not defile my drunkenness by remembering his name.
FUCK NUMBER TWO Can we come back to me ? Of course we can, but is it really worth it , after I have spoiled my carefully cultivated image of myself, first by invoking my friend, the Man who was liked by Women, despite his assiduous reading of Marie Claire ( women too, mind you, don’t like too much the idea of a guy who likes them too much, who reads their stuff, who actually PAYS TOO MUCH ATTENTION to them), second by mentioning Shafty, as his Navy colleagues used to call him, also known as John Fritzgerald Kennedy, who got laid by Holly Golilghtly, also known as Marylin Monroe, among others…after this, can I have some space in My blog for myself, please ?
Ok, I have been able to think of myself, again. It all started innocently, with that sentence, saying that I have sometimes have fantasies of myself being someone who is immensely involved in sex. Not, the reader will have understood from the above, in an ABSORBED way. A MAN can, if he wishes to, be intensely involved in sex , but he is supposed to be intellectually and emotionally DETACHED from it. The young ( of course, sexually attractive ) Sociology student asks him : “ What has been the frequency of your sexual activity since your wife went to China ?” He, ( despite his too many beers since his wife went away, he of course still has a flat belly) : “Well sometimes I … go to see … prostitutes” ( the scientific tone disculpates him). She ( wondering, of course, secretly sexually aroused) : “How many prostitutes have you slept with ?” He ( in a scientifically detached manner) : “Around 200. I don’t keep an exact count” “200 ? So many ?” ( That secret male desire : to IMPRESS). He, holding a beer bottle in his hands , detached, almost sad about it : “Yes, I think so” ….etc etc the reader can imagine the rest of the story. Of course she, the sociology student will sleep with him etc ( how could she not ?) . To repeat myself, my fantasy is to be involved in sex, yet to remain clean of the
STUFF that gets involved with it. It would be a sport exploit. Since my wife went to China, I would have slept with hundreds of prostitutes. My dick would be irreproachable, always answering the call of duty. Beyond the demands of these women, I would still have a lively interest in the women in the street, in the world of the web, thus manifesting an irreprochable manliness. Yet my soul would remain pure of the taint of sex. I would indulge in it with delight and perfect sportive performance. Yet I would remain a good boy, interested in higher pursuits. In the end, it is the dream of every man to be a perfect warrior, a perfect fucker, yet also be , beyond all this , a poet and a philosopher. The sensitive boy sissy, whose long hair we tugged at school , is , in some strange way, part of our masculine identity, the top of our edifice, while the bottom remains the rugged motherfucker who can fix the plumbing and give you a dirty joke and a prod in the ribs when you most need it.
Further thoughts ( I like the detached academic tone, which disculpates me from failure, because even if it is failure, it is one at a high –end level. O the masculine need to put one’s defeats at a high level, so that it gives the consolation of heroic death – the walkyries shall YET arrive, their rich moist pussies granting validation of manliness) : Oh gosh, I have forgotten. I have failed my first date, when the car should run smooth, when the restaurant should be perfect. Maculinity is the DEFEAT of the outside world, the saber-toothed tiger, the rundown car, the insolent waiter.Ah’m sorry, ah’ve forgotten what thought it was that I came upon while I went to pee ( peeing is an interesting no man’s land of gender. Some more liberated women friends of mine have no hesitation to say that they are going to pee. On the other hand, the very act of peeing marks a strong gender boundary. A woman has to hide behind a rock. A guy just walks back a few steps and turns his back. There’s a slight tinge of masculine power about the act, because it takes place through the penis, while defecation, an act which belongs to a much lower plane of being, is altogether another matter, wholly removed from sexuality. Peeing is a sort of very vague distant cousin of sex, an ugly mimic of it ). Ah’m sorry- it came to my mind, then it flipped its wings away ( the excuse of poetic language, when one has failed to perform the crude basic act. The flight to reassure the girl/woman that one’s poet ceiling exists, when her feet went through the plumber floor).
Sexuality is so funnily different, according to the sexes, with regard to class. A man feels the need to make a woman feel that he is a plumber who also ( but he’ll reveal that only bit by bit) happens to be a poet. A woman , on the other hand, feels the need to make her man understand that she’s a lady and then, reluctantly, she’ll slowly admit that she also happens to be a whore. Women start from the top , and work their way down. Men start from the bottom, and work their way up. But the bit of revelation is touchingly frightening for both. Men will admit , with some fright, that they are poets. Women will reluctantly admit that they are whores. The advantage belongs , I admit , to men : there is some glory in admitting that behind the plumber was also a poet, if one has been convincing about the plumbing bit. There is some letting down in admitting the whore bit, unless the man has been sufficiently touched by the lady part. Starting from the bottom is easier.
The masculine mistrust of women: the weeping widow afterwards went on to marry a Greek shipping tycoon. Women will not honour the poet in us, will not become sssshhhhhhhhhhhiiiiing librarians of our works .
The feminine mistrust of men…MEN. The resentment, so politically correct, even NECESSARY in our times, of men, in order to be a normal woman. For centuries before, a resentment against women, was politically correct, even NECESSARY, to be a normal man.Thus spins the wheel of fortune. The need to feel resentment against the weaker one: that eternal need of the dominant one. The slave owner NEEDS to resent the slave, for his feebleness, his cunning, his treachery. The master has the stronger vices, those of greater strength, of bullying. The slave has the weaker vices of duplicity.
I’m so sorry that I forgot what it was that I was thinking of while I went to pee. In my mind it has the ripe moist feel of unconquered pussy, of unkissed lips. High school love, who went out with someone else…
Monday, June 25, 2007
The seriousness of money ( glamourised people):
The other day while at a friend’s place I saw bits of a television series which is about a group of highly trained forensic policemen. I think it wasn’t “The Experts” but one of its imitations. The story had that lighting particular to American series and some of their films, a kind of glossiness with a lot of steely blues in the interior scenes. It also had that tensely glamorous atmosphere, with policewomen with something too pert and too smart about them, and the men looking like spinoffs of George Clooney or Brad Pitt. Everyone moves with a sort of crispness , no one ever fumbles, never hesitates. The computer guy sits on the computer and with a few keystrokes , enters into the Pentagon’s secret database or some other inaccessible place. It takes him a few tries to guess the bad guy’s password.
I don’t watch much of that kind of movie, but I am conscious that this taut ubersmart look is very much in fashion nowadays. Two years ago we were served with “Mr and Mrs Smith” which was so drenched in glamour that it wasn’t an action movie anymore as much as a sort of religious work, a Mystery play of style.
A profound gravity characterises people who are soaked in that “glamour liquid”, they are rigid like the faces of old emperors whose corpses have been preserved in lacquer. When I go to parties, I sometimes come across young people working in corporate positions in big companies. They also give off that impression of almost supernatural seriousness about themselves, as if, while tolerating the company of mere mortals around them, their minds were elsewhere, attuned to the higher spheres of creation, in touch with the innermost cycles of money. Their shades are sacramental masks, behind which their eyes, turned inwards, gaze at inner vaults laden with gold and pearls of great price.
In “Voyage au bout de la nuit”, Celine remarked on the sacred character of the banks he saw in New York, cathedral like buildings where business was conducted in reverential silence.
Maybe humanity has never been so serious as it is nowadays. It’s hard to know, for these are things about which we have pretty little information regarding how it was, in the past. The demands we make on today’s children would probably have surprised our ancestors. We certainly ask too much of today’s women – perfect bodies, success at work, perfect housekeeping, perfect mothers. The pressure is getting harder on men, too – perfect husbands, attentive, yet winners at work too.
I love America, but for once I’ll say it: the Americans are the main culprits in this frenzy for overachievement, overglamourisation. In the 19th century, Americans were already considered a deadly serious people. A nation of immigrants, hell bent on self improvement, on making it to the top. Historians are amazed at the thoroughness with which the Civil War was conducted, the Yankee armies methodically laying to waste every Southern city they came upon, the battles fought with extraordinary rates of casualties, for the times.
American humour has a random quality to it, the kind of jokes one expects from people who work too much, and start laughing at anything in an exhausted relaxation of the nerves. Woody Allen’s humour doesn’t count as American, it is quintessencial Jewish humour, of an old, old people, who have been through everything and expect the worst as part of life.
One can only hope that this madness of self-seriousness, self-worship will not take hold in the human brain. Our species has not gone through all that it has gone through, to end up becoming a bunch of hyperneat overachievers, with trembling hands and a jar of sleeping pills on the bedside table.
That would be really sad, especially now that science has given us the means to really enjoy life on this planet. Personnally, I feel that we have enough science as it is, and that it is dangerous, even madness to embark in more research in fields such as genetics. We should rather use the knowledge we have to make the world a garden, a place where people live good, simple lives . It may seem naïve, but the poignant thing is that it is actually possible . A remote possibility, but one which exists, unlike the never-never land of communism. But unfortunately, with this craze for more and more things, all them sleek and glossy, and with people themselves becoming sleeker and glossier, as if they also started to become like the products they own, we are going far from the idea of the world as a garden ( and closer and closer to the world becoming one big airport, with its sanitised atmosphere, its duty free shops, its dull people reading dull magazines, its deadly seriousness).
The other day while at a friend’s place I saw bits of a television series which is about a group of highly trained forensic policemen. I think it wasn’t “The Experts” but one of its imitations. The story had that lighting particular to American series and some of their films, a kind of glossiness with a lot of steely blues in the interior scenes. It also had that tensely glamorous atmosphere, with policewomen with something too pert and too smart about them, and the men looking like spinoffs of George Clooney or Brad Pitt. Everyone moves with a sort of crispness , no one ever fumbles, never hesitates. The computer guy sits on the computer and with a few keystrokes , enters into the Pentagon’s secret database or some other inaccessible place. It takes him a few tries to guess the bad guy’s password.
I don’t watch much of that kind of movie, but I am conscious that this taut ubersmart look is very much in fashion nowadays. Two years ago we were served with “Mr and Mrs Smith” which was so drenched in glamour that it wasn’t an action movie anymore as much as a sort of religious work, a Mystery play of style.
A profound gravity characterises people who are soaked in that “glamour liquid”, they are rigid like the faces of old emperors whose corpses have been preserved in lacquer. When I go to parties, I sometimes come across young people working in corporate positions in big companies. They also give off that impression of almost supernatural seriousness about themselves, as if, while tolerating the company of mere mortals around them, their minds were elsewhere, attuned to the higher spheres of creation, in touch with the innermost cycles of money. Their shades are sacramental masks, behind which their eyes, turned inwards, gaze at inner vaults laden with gold and pearls of great price.
In “Voyage au bout de la nuit”, Celine remarked on the sacred character of the banks he saw in New York, cathedral like buildings where business was conducted in reverential silence.
Maybe humanity has never been so serious as it is nowadays. It’s hard to know, for these are things about which we have pretty little information regarding how it was, in the past. The demands we make on today’s children would probably have surprised our ancestors. We certainly ask too much of today’s women – perfect bodies, success at work, perfect housekeeping, perfect mothers. The pressure is getting harder on men, too – perfect husbands, attentive, yet winners at work too.
I love America, but for once I’ll say it: the Americans are the main culprits in this frenzy for overachievement, overglamourisation. In the 19th century, Americans were already considered a deadly serious people. A nation of immigrants, hell bent on self improvement, on making it to the top. Historians are amazed at the thoroughness with which the Civil War was conducted, the Yankee armies methodically laying to waste every Southern city they came upon, the battles fought with extraordinary rates of casualties, for the times.
American humour has a random quality to it, the kind of jokes one expects from people who work too much, and start laughing at anything in an exhausted relaxation of the nerves. Woody Allen’s humour doesn’t count as American, it is quintessencial Jewish humour, of an old, old people, who have been through everything and expect the worst as part of life.
One can only hope that this madness of self-seriousness, self-worship will not take hold in the human brain. Our species has not gone through all that it has gone through, to end up becoming a bunch of hyperneat overachievers, with trembling hands and a jar of sleeping pills on the bedside table.
That would be really sad, especially now that science has given us the means to really enjoy life on this planet. Personnally, I feel that we have enough science as it is, and that it is dangerous, even madness to embark in more research in fields such as genetics. We should rather use the knowledge we have to make the world a garden, a place where people live good, simple lives . It may seem naïve, but the poignant thing is that it is actually possible . A remote possibility, but one which exists, unlike the never-never land of communism. But unfortunately, with this craze for more and more things, all them sleek and glossy, and with people themselves becoming sleeker and glossier, as if they also started to become like the products they own, we are going far from the idea of the world as a garden ( and closer and closer to the world becoming one big airport, with its sanitised atmosphere, its duty free shops, its dull people reading dull magazines, its deadly seriousness).
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
I am reading Philippe Djian’s “Criminels” and I can feel an ugliness of being emanating from the pages of the book. There is no physical description of the main characters, as far as I can remember, but I can almost smell their fetid breath, feel their flabby bellies, see their empty eyes. Not that they are peculiar people. The main character, Francis is a laid off harbour worker, there is also a sort of male –hysterical character called Victor, a policeman called Ralph, his nymphomaniac wife Nicole and a woman called Sonia who all the time talks in terms of aura and vibrations, but, oddly enough, seems to be sanest, healthiest person in the story. I say “seem” because it is rather difficult to make up what exactly is happening as the story unfolds, because it is a blur of vapid conversations between the characters, which comes to the reader as through a haze, as if he is sitting dead drunk in their midst. It feels as if you had gone on a month-long group tour of some incredibly boring country – the Kerguelen islands, maybe ? I am maybe insulting the place out of ignorance - and the people you are with are an incredibly bland, boring, suspicious lot, and on the evening of the last day of that trip, the whole group sits together by a camp fire on a bleak shore, under a grey sky, and for some reason, maybe because you want to remember the vacuous horror of this moment, or because you are so drunk that you decide you’d better do this or else you’ll be doing something sillier such as picking up a fight, you have decided to film the whole scene with your camcorder. So there you go, doing close ups of all those faces you want so much to forget, tomorrow morning, picking up snatches of conversations, having long takes of someone’s feet, patiently recording how, as the evening progresses, your “friends” – who, during that one month, have been cheating on each other like it was getting out of fashio – fall, one after the other, flat forward in a puddle of mumbled accusations, laments, wisecracks and flashes of anger. From time to time, the camera shifts to filming the steely, implacable sea and the cruel looking clouds, to allow the viewer some relief. But the analogy is misplaced – because, someone who takes the camera and films these people is , in a way, proclaiming his distance from them. But the reader is emotionally plunged in the story – it is well written enough for this to happen – so there is no escape : one feels at one with the characters, and the terrible thing is that they are not even wholly evil : Francis tries to take care of his insane father, Elizabeth tries to bring together Francis and his son, Francis really cares for Elizabeth. But for some reason , love is not enough, things go awry. The Police (the rock group) said, in one of their songs: “There’s got to be an Invisible Sun, that gives it heat when the whole day’s gone”. It is as if this invisible sun had died out, and nothing good can ever come out of people, however hard they try.
Why is that so ? In the case of Francis, I have the impression that there is a hardened shell of cynicism about him, which makes him say unpleasant things one time too many. He is a Bogart too far gone into being Bogart, and who can only play the tough gangsters , the Lefties and Tigers of his earlier career, and will never graduate to being a Rick or even a Marlowe of his later years. One can only admire the courage of existentialist writers like Philippe Djian, to create such sordid, yet believable worlds as they do. It takes a lot of moral strength to do this without collapsing into madness.
Why is that so ? In the case of Francis, I have the impression that there is a hardened shell of cynicism about him, which makes him say unpleasant things one time too many. He is a Bogart too far gone into being Bogart, and who can only play the tough gangsters , the Lefties and Tigers of his earlier career, and will never graduate to being a Rick or even a Marlowe of his later years. One can only admire the courage of existentialist writers like Philippe Djian, to create such sordid, yet believable worlds as they do. It takes a lot of moral strength to do this without collapsing into madness.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
I have been reading “The Inheritance of Loss” by Kiran Desai, which won the Booker Prize last year. It is rather interesting, a good book, but the characters are not terribly appealing. A misanthropic retired judge rotting in a villa amidst the mountains, his orphan grand daughter, the son of their cook who scrapes a living as an illegal immigrant in New York – I am listing them in order of attractiveness: the judge is a dead bore, the girl is so-so, the cook’s son enlisted most of my interest, probably because of his underdog appeal. Anyway, I didn’t finish the novel. By the time I had reached about two thirds of it, I had the growing impression that the whole story didn’t have enough momentum for it to reach a convincing end.
I didn’t quite understand how this book got the Booker, and I went googling to see what other people felt about it. Thus did I stumble on an awful article entitled “Wounded by the West” written by Pankaj Mishra, in February 2006 in the New York Times. The link is as follows:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/books/review/12mishra.html?ex=1297400400&en=a3d469a1782b2d59&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt
Truly shocking, that article. The self rightedness of it. The just guy just lifts up everything which is wrong with the characters’ lives and personalities – the judge’s misanthropy, the servile anglophilia of the old crones whom the girl is friend to, the miseries of the illegal immigrant – and drops it all at the doorstep of the West. Just like that.
I don’t know if I’ve received a bad upbringing, but I tend to believe that people do share a bit of responsibility for who they’ve become, by the time they’re fifty. I didn’t know that a guy can spend his whole life as a bizzare, self-hating character, despising his fellow Indians, (badly) aping the British, but that it’s not his fault at all, no way, it’s because of colonialism. Oh really. Same goes for the old crones with their imported Marks and Spencer’s underwear or whatever.
You gather, reading Mr Mishra’s article, the idea that India was some sort of Utopia that was once invaded by some evil aliens coming from a mothership called the West, and they’ve laid the whole garden of Eden to waste.
But a few months before, I do remember having read part of an article from the same Mr Mishra, where he was telling how, after graduating from a provincial university in North India, he had spent one winter in the library at Benares University, reading all the novels that came by his hand, trying to pick up the latest names and trends in contemporary English literature. And after some research on him, I came to understand that it is when he himself made his way to England, that he became a successful author.
And that evil West that he is talking of, is it not also part of Kiran Desai’s inheritance ? She does have a German grandmother, doesn’t she ?
My point is, that Western culture which Mr Mishra is talking of like a clean sprightly elf talking of Sauron in his impregnable fortress, isn’t it part of Indian civilisation, in the same way as the Persian/Arabic heritage in Northern India, even stronger, actually ? When the top brass wakes up in India, they do read the Times of India and The Hindu at breakfast, don’t they, I mean, they read English language newspapers. And they do like to send their kids to Catholic schools, and later to English-speaking universities and IIM’s… Mr Mishra is part of that set up, the West has made him well-known and prosperous, and so is Ms Desai. I’m not blaming them for that, it’s just that one has to face the fact of life, which is that India’s elite does have a love affair with the West.
That does not mean the West is beyond reproach, far from that. But that Mr Mishra should come in on his high horses, like that, talking about the West as if he was some tiger-skin clad sadhu in the Himalayas, it’s pretty rich.
I suspect it’s a habit of the Indian top brass, of suddenly lecturing others as if they themselves were beings of light. The way they can just , at the drop of a hat, start talking of the “spiritual decadence of the West” always leaves me breathless. What on earth gives them the entitlement to talk of spirituality and morality, they who live in a society which is greedy and corrupt to the core ? I like the way they explain away the poverty and backwardness of their country by blaming it on the poor. Yessir, they do, I have heard Indians explain to me, without blinking an eye, that India is held up in its progress by its rampant population growth, and that’s because they’re a democratic country, so they just can’t enforce a one child policy like the eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeviiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiil Chinese do. So, they just have to let the poor keep breeding, nothing doing , yaar, hopeless bunch, those poor. Pretty clever explanation, eh ?
I must have been reading the wrong articles on sustainable report, but it just happens that whatever I read on the matter, I always come across the notion that one of the key elements for sustainable development is mass literacy, especially the education of the girl child. A literate girl child will, once married, have a greater tendency to be interested in learning about contraception, and to use it. She will also tend to see to it that her children get some education, as she herself can read and write. An illiterate woman, on the other hand, is ignorant and superstitious, and will feel afraid to go enquire about contraception methods or anything regarding her well-being, for that matter. She will feel ashamed that she won’t understand what is explained to her.
So, you’d expect that Indian society would care to give some education and basic health care to its poor. No go, man. Indian society is profoundly elitist, and Nehruvian “socialism” hasn’t changed that. On the contrary, Nehru, with his obsession with heavy industry and electric dams, saw to it that the country was well provided in universities and technical institutes. He didn’t care much about mass education and health care. India’s fabulous economic growth is happening in the cities. Its countryside is like the African bush – no roads lead to there, and there’s just nothing out there but mud huts strewn amidst the fields. One can read the World Bank reports about rural education and health services in India. It’s shocking.
And it’s even more shocking to hear well-off Indians talk about their poor. A friend of mine just came back from Delhi and the Indian official who was guiding him through town said, acknowledging my friend’s shock at seeing the people living on shacks on the roadside: “Don’t bother yourself with these people. They live, breed and die on the streets. It’s always been like that”. Nobody sees the poor in India, not in reality, and even less on television, which is filled with fair-skinned, prosperous actors and actresses in the soap operas. Let’s not even talk of Bollywood. And they say that the West is racist….
It’s a pretty nice life, actually, being one of India’s elite. The state scoops up its meager resources to build you gleaming, state-of –the-art universities and IIT’s and IIM’s, while the rural poor squat under the trees around a piece of rotten chalkboard. Once you’ve squeezed the country’s educational resources to the limit, you get yourself a green card and fly to the States. But not only that, man, you also have a CLEAN CONSCIENCE. Ah mean, whatever’s going bad in poor ole India, it’s the fault of the White Man, and of the niggers in the countryside…
I didn’t quite understand how this book got the Booker, and I went googling to see what other people felt about it. Thus did I stumble on an awful article entitled “Wounded by the West” written by Pankaj Mishra, in February 2006 in the New York Times. The link is as follows:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/books/review/12mishra.html?ex=1297400400&en=a3d469a1782b2d59&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt
Truly shocking, that article. The self rightedness of it. The just guy just lifts up everything which is wrong with the characters’ lives and personalities – the judge’s misanthropy, the servile anglophilia of the old crones whom the girl is friend to, the miseries of the illegal immigrant – and drops it all at the doorstep of the West. Just like that.
I don’t know if I’ve received a bad upbringing, but I tend to believe that people do share a bit of responsibility for who they’ve become, by the time they’re fifty. I didn’t know that a guy can spend his whole life as a bizzare, self-hating character, despising his fellow Indians, (badly) aping the British, but that it’s not his fault at all, no way, it’s because of colonialism. Oh really. Same goes for the old crones with their imported Marks and Spencer’s underwear or whatever.
You gather, reading Mr Mishra’s article, the idea that India was some sort of Utopia that was once invaded by some evil aliens coming from a mothership called the West, and they’ve laid the whole garden of Eden to waste.
But a few months before, I do remember having read part of an article from the same Mr Mishra, where he was telling how, after graduating from a provincial university in North India, he had spent one winter in the library at Benares University, reading all the novels that came by his hand, trying to pick up the latest names and trends in contemporary English literature. And after some research on him, I came to understand that it is when he himself made his way to England, that he became a successful author.
And that evil West that he is talking of, is it not also part of Kiran Desai’s inheritance ? She does have a German grandmother, doesn’t she ?
My point is, that Western culture which Mr Mishra is talking of like a clean sprightly elf talking of Sauron in his impregnable fortress, isn’t it part of Indian civilisation, in the same way as the Persian/Arabic heritage in Northern India, even stronger, actually ? When the top brass wakes up in India, they do read the Times of India and The Hindu at breakfast, don’t they, I mean, they read English language newspapers. And they do like to send their kids to Catholic schools, and later to English-speaking universities and IIM’s… Mr Mishra is part of that set up, the West has made him well-known and prosperous, and so is Ms Desai. I’m not blaming them for that, it’s just that one has to face the fact of life, which is that India’s elite does have a love affair with the West.
That does not mean the West is beyond reproach, far from that. But that Mr Mishra should come in on his high horses, like that, talking about the West as if he was some tiger-skin clad sadhu in the Himalayas, it’s pretty rich.
I suspect it’s a habit of the Indian top brass, of suddenly lecturing others as if they themselves were beings of light. The way they can just , at the drop of a hat, start talking of the “spiritual decadence of the West” always leaves me breathless. What on earth gives them the entitlement to talk of spirituality and morality, they who live in a society which is greedy and corrupt to the core ? I like the way they explain away the poverty and backwardness of their country by blaming it on the poor. Yessir, they do, I have heard Indians explain to me, without blinking an eye, that India is held up in its progress by its rampant population growth, and that’s because they’re a democratic country, so they just can’t enforce a one child policy like the eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeviiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiil Chinese do. So, they just have to let the poor keep breeding, nothing doing , yaar, hopeless bunch, those poor. Pretty clever explanation, eh ?
I must have been reading the wrong articles on sustainable report, but it just happens that whatever I read on the matter, I always come across the notion that one of the key elements for sustainable development is mass literacy, especially the education of the girl child. A literate girl child will, once married, have a greater tendency to be interested in learning about contraception, and to use it. She will also tend to see to it that her children get some education, as she herself can read and write. An illiterate woman, on the other hand, is ignorant and superstitious, and will feel afraid to go enquire about contraception methods or anything regarding her well-being, for that matter. She will feel ashamed that she won’t understand what is explained to her.
So, you’d expect that Indian society would care to give some education and basic health care to its poor. No go, man. Indian society is profoundly elitist, and Nehruvian “socialism” hasn’t changed that. On the contrary, Nehru, with his obsession with heavy industry and electric dams, saw to it that the country was well provided in universities and technical institutes. He didn’t care much about mass education and health care. India’s fabulous economic growth is happening in the cities. Its countryside is like the African bush – no roads lead to there, and there’s just nothing out there but mud huts strewn amidst the fields. One can read the World Bank reports about rural education and health services in India. It’s shocking.
And it’s even more shocking to hear well-off Indians talk about their poor. A friend of mine just came back from Delhi and the Indian official who was guiding him through town said, acknowledging my friend’s shock at seeing the people living on shacks on the roadside: “Don’t bother yourself with these people. They live, breed and die on the streets. It’s always been like that”. Nobody sees the poor in India, not in reality, and even less on television, which is filled with fair-skinned, prosperous actors and actresses in the soap operas. Let’s not even talk of Bollywood. And they say that the West is racist….
It’s a pretty nice life, actually, being one of India’s elite. The state scoops up its meager resources to build you gleaming, state-of –the-art universities and IIT’s and IIM’s, while the rural poor squat under the trees around a piece of rotten chalkboard. Once you’ve squeezed the country’s educational resources to the limit, you get yourself a green card and fly to the States. But not only that, man, you also have a CLEAN CONSCIENCE. Ah mean, whatever’s going bad in poor ole India, it’s the fault of the White Man, and of the niggers in the countryside…
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
While I was doing some research on China National Highway 219 ( Xinjiang to Tibet) for my second novel, I came across this website whose candid style I like a lot:
http://www.tibettravel.info/get-to-tibet/xinjiang-tibet-highway.html
It's a Tibet travel info guide and it does not pull any punches:
In Burang County, the Holy Lake, Manasarova (Mapam Tso), enjoys equal popularity as the Holy Mountain. The lake covers 412square kilometers (159 square miles) and its altitude is 4,587 meters (15049 feet) and is 77 meters deep at the deepest point. Judging by the area, altitude and depth of the lake, Lake Manasarova doesn’t stand out. But because it is called the “Jasper Lake” on earth [Jasper Lake is a place mentioned in clinical Chinese mythologies as a lake in the Kunlun Mountains where a Goddess lives], it is considered the most venerated queen of the plateau lakes. Many Buddhists deem that as long as they can gaze upon the lake, they are sainted. If they circumambulate the lake, it was just like the circumambulation around the Holy Mountain, which can accumulate benevolence and at least excuse the pain of being sent to the hell after their death.
Most mainland Chinese don't quite get the point about sacredness, in general. Of course, there have been a great many religious movements in Chinese history, sometimes taking on millenarian tones ( the White Lotus, the Heavenly Kingdom), but I get the impression that the main thrust of Chinese culture is literary, not religious. The mandarin, well versed in poetry and history , is the central character of Chinese culture.
Conversely, the central character of Indian culture is the brahmin, versed in sacred texts and in philosophical speculation. Indians are fond of philosophy, and the Chinese of literature and history.
In the opening paragraph of that website, the writer talks of the "overwhelming charm of lake Manosarovar" . The use of the word "charm" is interesting, I have the impression that, out of habit, he is using it when speaking of a lake, having read so much Chinese poetry about the Western Lake ( near Suzhou), and about the beauty of nature, in general. An Indian writer would have quoted text after text from the holy scriptures, about the sanctity of the lake.
When my son started talking, it was interesting to see that my mother's first concern was to make him learn prathna ( making Hindu prayers) while my wife was teaching him Tang Dynasty poetry -
http://www.chinapage.org/libai014.html
It is probably the most beloved of Chinese poems.
http://www.tibettravel.info/get-to-tibet/xinjiang-tibet-highway.html
It's a Tibet travel info guide and it does not pull any punches:
The Xinjiang-Tibet Highway will be blocked by snow in winter and spring and it’s impossible to travel. The best time to drive is from May to the middle of October. The climate in the trip is terrible and food and accommodation condition is not good, either. Clothes to guard against the coldness should be prepared. Medicines against ailments and illness (medicine to stop diarrhea, diminish inflammation, and to treat the cold) according to the physical conditions of the tourists themselves should also be prepared. All people will have altitude reaction on Jieshandaban Mountain, so tourists are advised to take some medicines and oxygen.
Room and board conditions are not good along the highway. So it’s advisable to take some solid food and sleeping bag. Vegetables are short along the road, so some vitamin pills should be taken.
I like the slightly puzzled tone taken by the writer regarding the holiness given to Mount Kailash and lake Manosarovar. Here's an excerpt regarding the latter:In Burang County, the Holy Lake, Manasarova (Mapam Tso), enjoys equal popularity as the Holy Mountain. The lake covers 412square kilometers (159 square miles) and its altitude is 4,587 meters (15049 feet) and is 77 meters deep at the deepest point. Judging by the area, altitude and depth of the lake, Lake Manasarova doesn’t stand out. But because it is called the “Jasper Lake” on earth [Jasper Lake is a place mentioned in clinical Chinese mythologies as a lake in the Kunlun Mountains where a Goddess lives], it is considered the most venerated queen of the plateau lakes. Many Buddhists deem that as long as they can gaze upon the lake, they are sainted. If they circumambulate the lake, it was just like the circumambulation around the Holy Mountain, which can accumulate benevolence and at least excuse the pain of being sent to the hell after their death.
Most mainland Chinese don't quite get the point about sacredness, in general. Of course, there have been a great many religious movements in Chinese history, sometimes taking on millenarian tones ( the White Lotus, the Heavenly Kingdom), but I get the impression that the main thrust of Chinese culture is literary, not religious. The mandarin, well versed in poetry and history , is the central character of Chinese culture.
Conversely, the central character of Indian culture is the brahmin, versed in sacred texts and in philosophical speculation. Indians are fond of philosophy, and the Chinese of literature and history.
In the opening paragraph of that website, the writer talks of the "overwhelming charm of lake Manosarovar" . The use of the word "charm" is interesting, I have the impression that, out of habit, he is using it when speaking of a lake, having read so much Chinese poetry about the Western Lake ( near Suzhou), and about the beauty of nature, in general. An Indian writer would have quoted text after text from the holy scriptures, about the sanctity of the lake.
When my son started talking, it was interesting to see that my mother's first concern was to make him learn prathna ( making Hindu prayers) while my wife was teaching him Tang Dynasty poetry -
Chuang qian ming yue guang
Yi Shi di shang shuang
Ju tou wang ming yue
Di tou si gu xiang
This is a website which gives three translations of this poem:http://www.chinapage.org/libai014.html
It is probably the most beloved of Chinese poems.
Monday, May 14, 2007
Overheard the other day on Radio France Internationale, a kind of literary commentator of daily life, telling the following anecdote: He found, in a newspaper, a classified advert which said ( I am telling from memory): “Dear unknown Miss, I am the young man who was sitting next to you in Restaurant… last Saturday. On that day, like every Saturday, I took my grandmother out for lunch. While she was talking to me, my attention wandered to you, you were the tall brunette dressed in (…) who was sitting at the next table, and were reading a novel. and while you were on your way out, you had the waiter pass to me a note which I found very touching. I would very much like to meet you again. Signed (…)” Isn’t the whole story touching, said our commentator. One imagines the young man, neatly dressed for the occasion, coming to pick up his grandmother, as on every Saturday. She herself is her best clothes, with a drop of cologne behind her ears, and started eagerly waiting for him a quarter of an hour before the time he usually comes. They go out, she probably chooses the same restaurant half of the time. She has ordered a lamb chop maybe and a Tarte Tatin, and is telling him for the umpteenth time how she met his grandfather on the eve of the feast of St Jean, in a provincial town. He, grown a little absent minded from the retelling, lets his eyes wander to the tall brunette, absorbed in a novel in the table next to them. He believes that she has not noticed him, but later on a note comes to his table, while she is on her way out. One would like the handwriting to be a beautiful cursive, so film-like , or novel-like it all sounds.
Touching indeed, and so classy. It must have happened in one of the provincial towns. Paris struck me as being such a mess, its people rude and tense.
As long as there are young men who take their grandmothers out for lunch every Saturday, said our commentator as a conclusion, and who afterwards pine for brunettes who left them some mysterious note, there is reason to hope about life.
It is the kind of story which made me long so much, in my youth, to go to France. Whatever disappointments I’ve had later on, I guess I’ll always love France for some things. The other day, I happened on the website of a not –too-well known, I guess, French publishing house, called l’Asiathèque, devoted to things Asian. Just on their literature section, these guys had published such books, all in French, as a collection of poems by two 18th century Korean poets, an epic poem by an early 20th century Turkmen, or what is Uzbek poet, another one by a modernist Bengal poet of the 1930’s, a collection of folk tales from an ancient Chinese writer who was interested in the subject, a sort of Andersen of his times.
And it just went on and on like this. Then there was the philosophy section, and still others.
That reminded me of walking near the rue des Ecoles, in the Quartier Latin, and coming on an old Armenian bookstore, like in a film, with a bearded old man wearing wire rimmed round glasses, and shelves crammed full of old Armenian books, but also travel books in different languages, and old bilingual dictionaries. Later on, another library I came upon was doing a special event on Octavio Paz and there were first editions of his works lying open on the front window. In the background, a big ornate hotel particulier was holding an exhibition on “Birds in sacred Western African Art”.
It’s all so densely packed. Everything in Paris is crammed, the culture, the business, the politics. It’s fascinating but impossible to live in, in the long term, unless one was born a Parisian. There is too much of everything, and it’s mostly ridiculously expensive. But thank God, it’s there. The world would be an awful place were it not for the French, you have to allow that to them. But if only they could spread out a bit out of Paris…
Touching indeed, and so classy. It must have happened in one of the provincial towns. Paris struck me as being such a mess, its people rude and tense.
As long as there are young men who take their grandmothers out for lunch every Saturday, said our commentator as a conclusion, and who afterwards pine for brunettes who left them some mysterious note, there is reason to hope about life.
It is the kind of story which made me long so much, in my youth, to go to France. Whatever disappointments I’ve had later on, I guess I’ll always love France for some things. The other day, I happened on the website of a not –too-well known, I guess, French publishing house, called l’Asiathèque, devoted to things Asian. Just on their literature section, these guys had published such books, all in French, as a collection of poems by two 18th century Korean poets, an epic poem by an early 20th century Turkmen, or what is Uzbek poet, another one by a modernist Bengal poet of the 1930’s, a collection of folk tales from an ancient Chinese writer who was interested in the subject, a sort of Andersen of his times.
And it just went on and on like this. Then there was the philosophy section, and still others.
That reminded me of walking near the rue des Ecoles, in the Quartier Latin, and coming on an old Armenian bookstore, like in a film, with a bearded old man wearing wire rimmed round glasses, and shelves crammed full of old Armenian books, but also travel books in different languages, and old bilingual dictionaries. Later on, another library I came upon was doing a special event on Octavio Paz and there were first editions of his works lying open on the front window. In the background, a big ornate hotel particulier was holding an exhibition on “Birds in sacred Western African Art”.
It’s all so densely packed. Everything in Paris is crammed, the culture, the business, the politics. It’s fascinating but impossible to live in, in the long term, unless one was born a Parisian. There is too much of everything, and it’s mostly ridiculously expensive. But thank God, it’s there. The world would be an awful place were it not for the French, you have to allow that to them. But if only they could spread out a bit out of Paris…
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Yesterday I heard on the BBC that the Indian government conducted some ceremonies to mark the 150 th anniversary of the 1857 mutiny. By coincidence, the other day I was reading a book called “A Sahib remembers” which is a collection of interesting anecdotes and commentaries about the days of the British Raj. One of them was about the blowing up of the Delhi Magazine during the Mutiny. The Indian Mutineers had surrounded the Magazine, which contained a vast amount of weaponry and gunpowder, and was guarded by some British soldiers. The latter decided to blow the place rather than surrender, given the vital importance of that arsenal . Of course, that meant they would be killed on the spot.
Amazingly though, it seems that some of the British soldiers did survive the explosion. If I do remember well, one of them was picked up by a friendly Sikh soldier who hid him in his village for the rest of the Mutiny.
This morning, thinking back of the news about this ceremony in India , I was led to thoughts quite far removed from the politics and warfare of that period- I was thinking of that British soldier who survived what must have been a huge explosion. I was fascinated by the image of that man, probably in the redcoat uniform of the British Army of those days, flying up against the blue sky, his legs spinning as if he was pushing the pedals of an invisible flying bicycle. The cartoonish humour of it – the comical movement of his legs, looking for ground to tread on, he looking punily human against the vastness of the sky, that impression emphasised by his old fashioned uniform, all brass buttons and regimental insignias, a mere mortal visiting for a moment the domain of the gods, only to be punished the moment after by the fall back to the ground.
The image is funny yet one also feels some envy for him, as for all those who take to the skies, even for a brief moment. Of course we do fly nowadays, but in different manners, about which I guess there is a scale of disappointment corresponding to the degree of distance from what would be ideal flying. Lowest on that scale would be commercial flying, which is basically sitting in a narrow seat, flipping through magazines in a sort of train which happens to glide up high in the air rather than go on a railtrack. Much better is what one sees audacious people doing with delta planes, these big flying sail contraptions which take off from mountain slopes. They maneuver them with some levers by which they guide the sail up and down prevailing winds, and from what I have seen them do on television, it seems the more adept ones practice what is the nearest humanly possible form of ideal flying.
The latter being flying such as we do in dreams : soaring up from the ground simply because you feel like it. In my case, I will occasionally , in the middle of a dream, realise that I am not subject to gravity and I will then slowly rise. I am aware, during the dream, that this is due to some special “technique” which I must master. There is some “lifting power” which enables me to go up, and it usually emanates from the palms of my hands. I must let go of the fear of falling, and then I go up, avoiding the tree branches and electric cables. At some point, usually a bit over the rooftops, I feel vertigo, and am afraid to rise further. I then try to move forward, but for some reason, it is pretty laborious. People are watching me, with amusement or annoyance rather than amazement. Sometimes they point at me and it seems they want to tell me to get down now.
Their annoyance I guess would come from the fact that they feel I am doing something reserved to a special few, normally saints and prophets: The Virgin Mary carried by angels , Prophet Muhammad on the Borak Mare, Elijah on his ladder, Saint Anthony on his pig. Or superheroes, our modern gods: Superman, Flame On, Iron Man (1).
Flying in a machine, on the other hand, does not bring about that idea of sacrilege. It is understood that flying this way is more like driving, and is usually even more cautious and rule based than driving a car. It is acknowledged to be the very serious business of steering an intensely serious looking piece of machinery.
In his anime works, Miyazaki constantly invents flying machines which correspond more to what, in our subconscious, flying machines ought to have been.
To begin with, they often have flapping or vibrating wings, like those of birds or insects. Airplanes strike us as being boringly machine-like because they have those static wings, jet engines being the worse, because at least turbo propeller airplanes have those fast moving propellers which make them look a bit insect like. His machines seem to be consciously doing the effort of swimming through the air. Even the huge evil looking bombers in “Howl's Moving Castle” have a row of slowly flapping winglets on either side. Real airplanes look like huge pieces of metal which hang in the air as if they negated it. One almost feels annoyed with scientists for inventing a piece of machinery which so completely defies common sense. ( In a post in December, I think, or maybe November , I have written about the discomfort we feel about scientific revolutions , because they tell us things which simply do not make sense- that the earth is round, that it is not the centre of the world, that we descend from apes, that a particle can be in two points in space at the same time, that the act of observing a phenomenon affects its behaviour)
Also, Miyazaki’s flying machines are often insanely maneuvrable , such as the dragonfly –like small airplanes of “Howl”, which even zip through the air with a buzzing insect sound. This is what flying a small airplane should have been like, an intensely fun roller coaster experience, instead of being so much about watching dials and checking coordinates.
Finally, they are not deadly. In the few Miyazaki anime I have seen, nobody ever gets killed from an airplane crash. If damaged, his airplanes simply zig zag down to the ground with a hurt sound. A real-world airplane, if damaged, plummets to the ground with merciless force, the speed with which it crashes down being revelatory of how profoundly alien to its aerial element it actually was. It is basically a sort of car engine which has been made to fly by some trick of playing with air lift.
Such is our destiny. Unfortunately, we are not a flying species, except maybe for some of our saints and prophets. Or maybe some of our deltaplane flyers. But I don’t know if even they can experience the lightness of being which ideal flying would be about.
Not even that British soldier was able to experience this blissful feeling: I have just checked about him in “A Sahib Remembers” ( by P.J.O. Taylor, by the way). His name was Raynor and he and his wife were standing under the one of the rare arches which did not fall down under the huge explosion, which was heard thirty kilometres away in Meerut. Both were uninjured and were helped through the rest of the Mutiny by friendly Indians.
Well, at least miracles do happen.
(1) Batman does not fly, but then he is a pretty special kind of superhero. He represents our wish to swallow a pill of evil, so that we could take revenge on those who oppress us – the child’s fantasy of becoming a big, fearsome man who will terrify the schoolyard bully. He is Night, but a Night in which we have become the bogeyman, that most earthlike of our frights, with his heavy steps, his rough, hairy hands and dark, unknowable face. The immense arsenal of weapons he hides under his mansion, those massively built, overweaponised cars and airplanes he rides in represent a wish to subdue Matter, so that we may fight back at Its grotesque, hostile manifestations ( the Joker, with his stiffened face and poisons, is a Troll of Matter). But, by virtue of his intimate contact with Matter, Batman cannot fly, for this is the attribute of the Spirit. He can only briefly hover and swing by the means of strong, steely wires ended with fierce looking hooks which grasp at Matter like sharp, precise claws.
Amazingly though, it seems that some of the British soldiers did survive the explosion. If I do remember well, one of them was picked up by a friendly Sikh soldier who hid him in his village for the rest of the Mutiny.
This morning, thinking back of the news about this ceremony in India , I was led to thoughts quite far removed from the politics and warfare of that period- I was thinking of that British soldier who survived what must have been a huge explosion. I was fascinated by the image of that man, probably in the redcoat uniform of the British Army of those days, flying up against the blue sky, his legs spinning as if he was pushing the pedals of an invisible flying bicycle. The cartoonish humour of it – the comical movement of his legs, looking for ground to tread on, he looking punily human against the vastness of the sky, that impression emphasised by his old fashioned uniform, all brass buttons and regimental insignias, a mere mortal visiting for a moment the domain of the gods, only to be punished the moment after by the fall back to the ground.
The image is funny yet one also feels some envy for him, as for all those who take to the skies, even for a brief moment. Of course we do fly nowadays, but in different manners, about which I guess there is a scale of disappointment corresponding to the degree of distance from what would be ideal flying. Lowest on that scale would be commercial flying, which is basically sitting in a narrow seat, flipping through magazines in a sort of train which happens to glide up high in the air rather than go on a railtrack. Much better is what one sees audacious people doing with delta planes, these big flying sail contraptions which take off from mountain slopes. They maneuver them with some levers by which they guide the sail up and down prevailing winds, and from what I have seen them do on television, it seems the more adept ones practice what is the nearest humanly possible form of ideal flying.
The latter being flying such as we do in dreams : soaring up from the ground simply because you feel like it. In my case, I will occasionally , in the middle of a dream, realise that I am not subject to gravity and I will then slowly rise. I am aware, during the dream, that this is due to some special “technique” which I must master. There is some “lifting power” which enables me to go up, and it usually emanates from the palms of my hands. I must let go of the fear of falling, and then I go up, avoiding the tree branches and electric cables. At some point, usually a bit over the rooftops, I feel vertigo, and am afraid to rise further. I then try to move forward, but for some reason, it is pretty laborious. People are watching me, with amusement or annoyance rather than amazement. Sometimes they point at me and it seems they want to tell me to get down now.
Their annoyance I guess would come from the fact that they feel I am doing something reserved to a special few, normally saints and prophets: The Virgin Mary carried by angels , Prophet Muhammad on the Borak Mare, Elijah on his ladder, Saint Anthony on his pig. Or superheroes, our modern gods: Superman, Flame On, Iron Man (1).
Flying in a machine, on the other hand, does not bring about that idea of sacrilege. It is understood that flying this way is more like driving, and is usually even more cautious and rule based than driving a car. It is acknowledged to be the very serious business of steering an intensely serious looking piece of machinery.
In his anime works, Miyazaki constantly invents flying machines which correspond more to what, in our subconscious, flying machines ought to have been.
To begin with, they often have flapping or vibrating wings, like those of birds or insects. Airplanes strike us as being boringly machine-like because they have those static wings, jet engines being the worse, because at least turbo propeller airplanes have those fast moving propellers which make them look a bit insect like. His machines seem to be consciously doing the effort of swimming through the air. Even the huge evil looking bombers in “Howl's Moving Castle” have a row of slowly flapping winglets on either side. Real airplanes look like huge pieces of metal which hang in the air as if they negated it. One almost feels annoyed with scientists for inventing a piece of machinery which so completely defies common sense. ( In a post in December, I think, or maybe November , I have written about the discomfort we feel about scientific revolutions , because they tell us things which simply do not make sense- that the earth is round, that it is not the centre of the world, that we descend from apes, that a particle can be in two points in space at the same time, that the act of observing a phenomenon affects its behaviour)
Also, Miyazaki’s flying machines are often insanely maneuvrable , such as the dragonfly –like small airplanes of “Howl”, which even zip through the air with a buzzing insect sound. This is what flying a small airplane should have been like, an intensely fun roller coaster experience, instead of being so much about watching dials and checking coordinates.
Finally, they are not deadly. In the few Miyazaki anime I have seen, nobody ever gets killed from an airplane crash. If damaged, his airplanes simply zig zag down to the ground with a hurt sound. A real-world airplane, if damaged, plummets to the ground with merciless force, the speed with which it crashes down being revelatory of how profoundly alien to its aerial element it actually was. It is basically a sort of car engine which has been made to fly by some trick of playing with air lift.
Such is our destiny. Unfortunately, we are not a flying species, except maybe for some of our saints and prophets. Or maybe some of our deltaplane flyers. But I don’t know if even they can experience the lightness of being which ideal flying would be about.
Not even that British soldier was able to experience this blissful feeling: I have just checked about him in “A Sahib Remembers” ( by P.J.O. Taylor, by the way). His name was Raynor and he and his wife were standing under the one of the rare arches which did not fall down under the huge explosion, which was heard thirty kilometres away in Meerut. Both were uninjured and were helped through the rest of the Mutiny by friendly Indians.
Well, at least miracles do happen.
(1) Batman does not fly, but then he is a pretty special kind of superhero. He represents our wish to swallow a pill of evil, so that we could take revenge on those who oppress us – the child’s fantasy of becoming a big, fearsome man who will terrify the schoolyard bully. He is Night, but a Night in which we have become the bogeyman, that most earthlike of our frights, with his heavy steps, his rough, hairy hands and dark, unknowable face. The immense arsenal of weapons he hides under his mansion, those massively built, overweaponised cars and airplanes he rides in represent a wish to subdue Matter, so that we may fight back at Its grotesque, hostile manifestations ( the Joker, with his stiffened face and poisons, is a Troll of Matter). But, by virtue of his intimate contact with Matter, Batman cannot fly, for this is the attribute of the Spirit. He can only briefly hover and swing by the means of strong, steely wires ended with fierce looking hooks which grasp at Matter like sharp, precise claws.
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)