5 july 2011
More thoughts about alien abductions
ah know that my explanation is a bit too pat, and can't explain away everything. ah came up with that theory more for the fun of imagining arab aliens.
brazilians get abducted too. it seems the alien abductors in latin america tend to have more of a "monster" shape.
indians don't usually get abducted by aliens. most of the time it turns out the alien was an elder brother, cousins or uncle who was trying to force them to sign papers relinquishing their share of the sugar cane field or of the family business. nah, just joking.
i don't know about chinese but i do remember an article at some time in 2000 in the ( english) press in beijing noting that a worker reported having been abducted by aliens. it would be fascinating to know how the chinese abductees see aliens.
basically when it comes to ufo's, i tend to follow jacques vallee's theory. he's an astronomer who's done some serious research on the phenomenon. i haven't read his books, but some interviews and articles. he notes that alien apparitions tend, over the centuries, to have a technology which is slightly beyond that of that historical period. in the middle ages, they are described as having "chariots of fire". in the 1896-7 and the 1909 waves of ufo sightings, it was airships ( blimps). then after 1945 it was flying saucers.
his theory - but like i said before, i haven't read his book, so i am relying on summaries of his thought - is that these beings come from some place maybe on earth itself, or maybe from some other dimension, and that they've been hanging around with people since many centuries. the reason why the shape of their vehicles changes could be either that their own technology is also evolving, always ahead of ours, or that we see their vehicles according to our cultural conditioning.
vallee wrote a book called passport to magonia, which is focused on the fairy lore of the celts, especially on how they tend to bring some people to their fairyland, called magonia. he proposes that these fairies and modern aliens are the same beings.
as an extrapolation from his theory, i would guess that aliens do tend to get laid with humans, and have been doing so since millenium, and that there's lots of people around who carry alien genes. ah mean, the celts say that the fairies do like to get laid with some country lads, and get children with them. alien abductions also feature lot of probing of genital parts.
some problem with his theory are that:
(i) if i do remember well, we do have 19th century reports from seamen, saying that they saw disks in the sky while in the open sea. there's also a description of a flying disk by a himalayan explorer early in the 20th century
(ii) the mystery airship sighting of 1896-7 was somewhere in west US, and could have been due to some solitary inventor having invented a prototype airship. there were some people inventing airships in those days.
but anyway, i'm interested in jacques vallee. from what i read about him, it seems he got into the ufo phenomenon at some time in the 1950's, when he was working in a space observatory and he presented to his boss a report that an unknown object had left earth and gone into space, but in a trajectory opposite to the rotation of the earth, which was impossible at the time. it seems that for some reason, you consume more energy if you enter outer space in a trajectory opposite to the rotation of the earth, and early rockets couldn't do that. his boss told him that if they sent this report to the americans, they would be ridiculed, and told him to throw away that report.
the french scientist in spielberg's "strange encounters of the third kind" is inspired from jacques vallee
30 june 2011
alien abductions - my personal theory
i have a personal theory regarding alien abductions. according to wikipedia, studies on alien abductees show that american abductees tend to describe the aliens as small, grey, with strange shaped eyes ( the famous "small grey aliens").
british abductees tend to describe them as tall, blond and athletic.
so my theory is that alien abductions reflect fear of invasion by foreigners. in the case of the US, it has been at war consecutively with three "yellow" people: the japanese ( world war 2), the north koreans and chinese ( korean war), the north vietnamese ( vietnam war). during the same time, the repeal of the chinese exclusion act in the 1950's meant that chinese people started to immigrate to the US. there were also influx of vietnamese, cambodian, laotian, korean refugees.
the alien abduction phenomenon would therefore reflect fear of invasion by the yellow race, and the grey alien would be a caricature of the asian race: small, frail, with strange eyes.
for the british, the battle of britain has been a defining moment in their recent history. there are endless programmes on tv commemorating that moment when the royal air force shot down the luftwaffe. the role of great britain as the saviour of europe in world war 2 is always celeberated in the press, books, tv.and thus we see that the abductor alien in britain tends to look more "aryan": tall and blond
According to my theory, the new invador in the imagination of americans and western people in general is the arab, coz we see so many images of arabs proclaiming war on the west, and coming to europe and US with their strange customs. therefore we should soon have reports of people reporting that they have been abducted by arab looking aliens
.here, i guess, is what such a typical report would be ( the abductee here is a woman):
i was on my bed when suddenly the room was flooded by a strange green light and two men appeared floating on a flying carpet. they were middle sized, swarthy skinned, with bushy eyebrows, bad beards and hooked noses, and waved their arms excitedly as they spoke. they grabbed me from the bed and shoved me on their carpet, which then flew at extraordinary speed.
soon we were on a sort of celestial highway, with thousands of other flying carpets. the traffic sometimes moved very fast, with the aliens overtaking each other in a very dangerous manner, and generally shouting insults at each other, and at other times there were immense traffic jams during which our carpet was immediately surrounded by alien children selling souvenirs, postal cards, car accessories which they shoved into my hands, saying they were gifts, after which they asked for money.
finally we reached a floating tent inside of which was gathered a large crowd. a bearded alien elder delivered a lengthy sermon in a strange guttural language, at the end of which i was told to convert to their religion. there followed a lengthy discussion as i said that i needed some time to reflect on this. they finally allowed me to return.
the return was uneventful except that one of the two aliens declared that he had meanwhile fallen in love with me, and called me habibi ( beloved) and asked me to be one of his wives. the other alien insisted that we stop at a shop belonging to his brother in law, and tried to sell me perfumes, amber beads, carpets and other souvenirs.
finally i was returned to my room, but they refused to go away unless i gave them a tip for their services.
Tuesday, August 02, 2011
Wednesday, June 01, 2011
Stuff from My Notes on Facebook
7 may 2011
william and kate wedding
ah been thinking recently 'bout what a stroke of public relation genius the will and kate marriage was for the royal family. after years of being accused of being snobbish and too far removed from the common people, this was the best thing the royals could have done: marry the future king to a commoner, and yet at the same time a commoner who actually looks much more regal and sophisticated than many in the royal family ( just compare kate to fergie).
ah think the response from the british public was pretty overwhelming in its warmth and goodwill, and that was coz it sprang from a deep root in what defines britishness: the good feeling which runs between their social classes. we all know how british society has well defined social classes, each with their own accent, habits and lifestyle. but a core aspect of british life has been the good natured relationship between these classes. according to whig historians, especially, that good relationship has been core to the great triumphs of great britain. it was this bond which enabled the british nobility to dismount from their horses at agincourt, to fight together with their bowmen and thus destroy the proud french nobility. again, it was british social harmony which meant that noble and seaman blended into such superb sailing teams in the royal navy, and sunk down the spanish fleet, where the soldiers treated sailors like galley slaves. most of all, it was this british ability for social classes to talk to each other which enabled the birth and growth of the mother of parliaments.
well anyway that's they whig thesis 'bout what makes britain great. anyway cheers to will and kate.
9 march 2011
'bout women's day ( one day late)
the world is becoming more feminine. it's a general feeling i have and which i guess others have too.
one curious example 'bout this is space exploration. a journalist once pointed out that up to the 70's, space exploration was all about some tough air force guys flying in space capsules, going to the moon, and scientists sending probes to the outer planets. however, the seventies saw the rise of the feminist and ecological movements, and by a curious process of influence, space exploration also became more inward-looking. skylab, the world's first space laboratory was sent into orbit. more and more satellites built for observation of the earth ( weather patterns, vegetation patterns, simple observation). the trend was no more towards colonisation of mars, but on the observation of mother earth, her moods and hiccups. space exploration has evolved from being "john wayne" to a more "touchy-feely" tone.
23 february 2011
two years in africa
yo it's been two years that ah'm in africa. ah'm sorry that ah'm gonna write touchy-feely stuff. bear with me.
plus side of the last two years in africa:
(i) the money. ah think most people go to work in africa coz of the expat allowances. or else, why come here ?
(ii) sometimes it's been interesting. in africa, a mauritian diplomat is a real diplomat. in europe, you spend your life picking up ministers at the airport to take them to the hotel. you're a nobody.
the minus side:
(i) extraordinary loneliness.
(ii) african towns suck. dirty and chaotic. no parks, no green areas.
(iii) the diseases. lots of them.
(iv) the crime. that one is more for mada. ethiopia is very safe.
about the interesting bits:
(i) at the AU, there was an interesting debate 'bout which one is more important: justice or peace ? should you seek justice against dictators or rebels who have made crimes, or make peace with them ? the fascinating aspect is that it was not a theoretical debate, but something that was happening every day in africa.
for example, uganda was contemplating at one point to make peace with the lord's resistance army. the most horrible of criminals. that would have meant an amnesty for joseph kony, their leader. but what about the victims ?
the International criminal court has issued a warrant of arrest against sudanese president omar al bashir for crimes against humanity, and war crimes in darfur. there was furious debate about this at the AU. basically, "muslim" countries (north and west afr) said (i) why not issue a warrant against israeli leaders for the war in gaza (ii) the warrant will complicate peace talks with darfuri rebels. "christian" countries (south and east africa) mainly supported the warrant arrest.
I was in the debate coz I participated in meetings re. the ICC. the passion with which each side defended its position was very striking. in particular, it's interesting to see that there are people in africa fighting for victims of atrocities to receive justice.
but should justice be at the cost of peace ? Later I met a very senior personality who told me: "what do they mean about justice ? We had to make peace with those criminals [there was a civil war in his country]. I personnally had to negociate with them and yet they have killed so many members of my family" and he added "There is no such thing as justice !"
In the case of his country, a union government was formed and amnisty was given to some people who had made some horrible crimes. yet, the formula has worked: that country is now peaceful.
(ii) another interesting bit: to see famous people. Or rather infamous people. Gaddafi: I've been in a room with him, late at night. Thank god there were other people in the room, ha ha. the man is not well in his head.
Talking of meeting people: i wish i had met more people here. there are interesting people in africa, like everywhere else. but of course it's so difficult, when you have work and have to take care of the family.
for example, there are two malagasy lawyers from harvard who do some pretty remarkable work here, they give lectures 'bout the new constitution, to explain its defects etc.
24 january 2011
the murder in the hotel
everyone's been talking of THAT murder in THAT hotel and they're talking talking 'bout death penalty, hang them high etc. ah'm thinkin' this way: instead of "hang them high", one big step we should take to address the social problems in mau would be to first ACCEPT that we are a modern society. it seems weird to say that but actually we in Mauritius don't accept that we have become a modern society. that's because the org socio culturelles keep telling us that basically we're a traditional, pious society and that of course there are problems but the remedy lies in prayer. the org socio have an approach of "exorcism" towards our social problems, ie that these problems are "demons" which can be exorcised by prayer and virtuous living.
there's nothing wrong with prayer and virtuous living but all the teenage mothers, drug addicts, sexual perverts, divorced couples, people with suicidal tendencies, etc in mauritius do also need the help of psychologists and therapists. But especially, we need first of all as a society to understand that we study our social problems in a methodical manner instead of relying on common wisdom and ethnic stereotypes. for example, we need social surveys on alcoholism ( what age do mauritians start drinking ? who first encouraged them to drink ? do rich or poor people drink more ? etc).
as a society we're very much afraid of doing surveys on social problems. i think we're afraid of annoying those horrible organisations socio culturelles. these guys will surely be livid with rage if one day the state does a survey on, say, divorce. why ? because according to their "traditional" approach, a social phenomenon like divorce should demonised and exorcised. whereas, when we do a social survey, we are suspending judgement and analysing the social phenomenon in a cool rational way. it's this shift in approach, from one of exorcism to analysis which the org socio culturelle are very afraid of.
yet it's clear that our society needs to wake up to the fact that it's become modern and suffers from the ills of modernity. and that it also needs to analyse its ills in a modern manner, being non judgemental, and analysing social phenomenon with parameters such as age, social class, psychological profiling, etc instead of considering any social problem as a "demon" and a "taboo" and someone who suffers from a problem as being "impure" and "sinful".
2 january 2011
two images of loneliness
two images of loneliness which have hanging in mah head these last few days:
the first one is of the last scenes in "the french lieutenant's woman" that movie with a young mery streep (yes, meryl streep was once young. how strange, i imagine her as having been forever middle aged and imperial), when the guy finally traces back the french lieutenant's woman. she's the governess in a house near a lake, and her employers are apparently modern, liberal people who know a bit about her past. the guy comes into her room upstairs, it's a room with a strangely modern look, not in a pleasant way: cold, bare and rather ugly. and something of the ugliness of that room tells us about the woman herself : she has escaped the horrors of victorian society, has found a job, she is free and lonely. the ending is "happy" in that they are reunited, but there is also something eerie about it. the furniture in that room makes one feel as if they have travelled in time, out of victorian times into the early 20th century.
the second image is that of the last moments in sissi's life. she is walking on the quay along the shore of lake leman in geneva, when a young man approaches her and stabs her heart with a thin knife. the knife is so thin, that at first she believes she has been punched. the man runs away, and she continues her walk. it's only when she comes aboard her boat that she collapses and dies.
elizabeth of wittelsbach, better known as sissi, empress of austria and queen of hungary, was in so many ways a forerunner of the typical woman of the 20th century: she freed herself from convention, she was not a little bit obsessed with her looks (she invented a private gym, and also suffered from anorexia). there is something touching, in that image of her walking incognito on the streets just before her death - like the french lieutenant's woman, she has achieved freedom, with a touch of loneliness. but of course, that final scene of her life has a grander pathos, because it seems like the prologue to so many of the horrors of the 20th century - which would engulf her husband, emperor francis joseph. maybe her death was an act of mercy by god, to spare her that vision.
25 september 2010
what the pope's visit to the uk got me musing about
so the pope's been to england and has beatified cardinal newman. ah haven't read cardinal newman's spiritual autobiography, the Pro Vita Sua though it's high on my must-read list, it's considered one of the great prose masterpieces of the english language.
thinking of cardinal newman has stirred some old longings in mah tired heart; on the one hand, it has briefly revived my episodic desire to convert to catholicism, a creeping desire which i've been having for the past ah dunno, five or more years, i think. ah like catholicism, ah like the old creaking structure of it, the lies, the power games of the cardinals, the nobility of soul of (some) priests and monks. it's only a lingering feeling of loyalty to the goddess durga that keeps me within the fold of hinduism. i like the virgin mary, i very much like to read the litany of loreto from time to time. but the goddess has her hold on me.
but the pope's visit to england has also stirred in me an old, old feeling for longing for that country. My interest for england goes back to the days when some of friends from high school went to study there. and i remember reading one morning in the culture page of l'express about zadie smith's first novel, "white teeth", with a photo of her (lovely girl), and i sighed at the idea of how exciting it would be there, in that magical place where black people and indian people and whatever could publish fresh, funny exciting books. london felt like the place where it was all happening, where salman rushdie and ben okri and kazuo ishiguro and michael ondaatje all converged to.
ah've only been there for a few days, a long time ago. to make matters worse, in a way, ah stayed in the house of the aunt of a friend of mine, and the aunt was quintessentially british, she had studied latin in cambridge ( they say "read" not "studied" in oxbridge, i think), was the descendant of an old line of latin lecturers in cambridge, actually, had two cats called homer and hercules. i'm saying it made matters worse because it was just so exactly the best of britain - so strongly itself, and hospitable at the same time. i was a paying guest, but for a very nominal fee. the other paying guest was an iranian student whom i never met.
actually many things felt exactly like i imagined they would be. london had precisely the grey dull weather and architecture that it's supposed to have. the milkman delivered his bottles in a funny little green eletric car, in the suburb where i lived- rows of houses, with narrow little living rooms inside. a crowded island. but british girls were much prettier than i expected ( i had expected horse faced creatures, like princess margaret). it was a bit like in japan, where i had expected the women to be all ravishing beauties, and the men to be little toothy gnomes, carrying suitcases half their height. actually i found japanese men to be rather taller, smarter and more handsome than i thought, and the girls were mostly ordinary, and didn't wear outlandish fashion, but then i didn't go to ginza.
it was a short visit, of only three days during which i bought about 10 kg of books in a second hand bookstore, and visited the british museum. i wondered once more, while i was there, what it would have been to actually have studied there. to have my character shaped by the british mould, like those mauritians who've been there - some of whom, for the rest of their lives bear an air of unfathomable gloom and boredom in the presence of others. the oxford air of effortless superiority and lassitude in being in the company of others.
actually i wonder whether the pinched snobbish air we always associate with the british is not a bit of a myth. isn't it just the style of some of the upper class ? and were the british upper class always like that ? i've been reading the history of the british kings since 1707 ( the year of the actual creation of the united kingdom, by the act of union). You think of George IV ( king from 1820 to 1830), infamous for his life of dissipation and wild extravagance. Even his successor, the more moderate, down to earth William IV (1830 -1837) , did bring nine illegitimate children to the altar when he got married at the age of 50, to the young princess Adelaide of Saxe Meiningen, aged 25 ( the marriage was apparently a happy one and the young princess took care of the illegitimate children, one of whom is the ancestor of the present British Prime Minister David Cameron). When William IV's niece Victoria ascended the throne, she decided to put an end to the wild lifestyle of the British royals and that's how we've had the victorian age of primness.
I think another source from which we get the idea of the british as prim and prudish is from reading jane austen. But the world she describes, of young girls from country gentry going to balls and trying to get married, is just one facet of the great britain of the 1800's. What about London, where an estimated 10 % of the female population worked as prostitutes ? These were the days of Emma, Lady Hamilton, probably the world's first supermodel. Lady Hamilton was born in a blacksmith's home, and from the age of 12 became a maid, then an "entertainer" for a dissolute man called Sir Harry Featherstonhaugh, who apparently liked to make her dance naked on the table for his guests. A young noble called Greville promptly fell in love with her - she was a great beauty and had become a famous model for artists- but when he decided to look for a wealthy bride to marry, he sent her basically as a gift to his elderly uncle Sir William Hamilton, the British Ambassador to Naples. He thus hoped to gratify himself with the uncle, and get a good mention in the latter's will. However the old Ambassador promptly also fell in love with her and married her, thus making her Lady Hamilton. In the meantime, she had become famous across Europe for her "Attitudes", poses she made at dinner parties in greek dress, to which guests had to guess the classical figure she was referring to. She actually started the fashion for greek dresses, which we see in paintings of women of those days, like the famous portrait of Juliette Recamier. lIn the middle of all this jolly scene in Naples arrived Lord Nelson, the naval hero and it is said that on their first meeting Lady Hamilton literally fainted in his arms, probably more out of admiration of his heroism than of his physical beauty, for he had been to sea since the age of 12, and his hair was white from sea salt, his skin was wrinkled like parchment, his teeth had been knocked out by scurvy, and he had one hand blown out by a french cannonball. Lady Hamilton, Sir William Hamilton and Lord Nelson then moved to London where they soon settled in a happy menage a trois which scandalised and fascinated all London.
So all this to say that the British are certainly not as prim as we often think them to be, and also that the likes of Lady Di and Prince Harry are actually very tame compared to what the British upper class used to be.
But to come back to my feelings about the UK, I can say it's a country I would love to know more about. London strikes me as one of the few truly international cities in the world, along with Singapore, Dubai and New York, cities which thrive on diversity. The UK has survived the anguish of the loss of empire by opening and mixing British culture with that of the immigrants who have settled there, thus making this country a thriving modern hub. Far from losing its own identity, it has kept a very strong national personality. I think it's a country which will still keep a vibrant presence in the world for the next 100 years.
16 june 2010
FDR the great aquarius ?
Writing 'bout Nixon as the archetypal capricorn has made me think of FDR. If N was the great (or terrible) capri, then was FDR the great aquarius ? Aquarians often have faces of striking nobility: great foreheads, aquiline noses, a grave, profound look. FDR had oodles of that. I especially love a photo of him, on the deck of the HMS Prince of Wales off the coast of Newfoundland in 41 , during his secret meeting with Churchill. He is staring away from the camera ( just like in the famous Yalta photo), like he's looking for someone, I wonder if it wasn't a politician's trick of offering his best face angle, because he must have known that he had such a striking profile. Meanwhile, Churchill is stodgily chomping his cigar, looking rather smug and crude ( I don't like Churchill very much).
Apart from the great looks, Aquarians believe very much in the brotherhood of humanity, and FDR was basically the founder of the UN. Interestingly, the other great believer in the UN at the time was his secretary of state Cordell Hull, a Libra. The UN charter was drafted by Hull and his staff.
FDR and Hull must have been quite a fascinating pair: FDR, the East Coast aristocrat par excellence, born in the lap of wealth and privilege, made an arranged marriage with a woman of distinction in her own right, basically the kind of man Nixon hated and envied from the depth of his soul. Hull, on the other hand, was the archetypal, almost mythological American: born in a log cabin in the depths of tennessee, on land given to his ancestors for distinguished service during the war of independence. Probably went to school barefoot, a la Tom Sawyer. Was admitted to the bar as a teenager, a bit like Lincoln, and was elected chairman of the clay county democrat party at the age of 19. Served as a captain in the tennessee volunteer infantry in the spanish american war.
When you add to the two of them Vice President Truman, the typical small town politician from Kansas with its gangsters and bootleggers, you have a pretty interesting cross section of american society of the time.
But among the three, it is to FDR that the eye naturally turns to: the grand statesman, looking not diminished, but ennobled by his wheelchair. I wonder if God was not merciful to him, when he made him die in 1945, sparing him from having to decide whether to drop the atomic bombs on Japan. What would he have decided ? How do you drop an atomic bomb on people, and then go on to found the UN ? You would look like a hypocrite.
Got to go to bed.
15 june 2010
nixon, the archetypal capricorn
One and a half years in ethiopia. Not a bad place, once you get used to some discomforts. It is much more a place for young people and people of an adventurous disposition, in general. If you are here with children, there's not many places to go to. I've been seriously bored here, on sundays !! The good side of it, is that this sunday boredom drove me to write this (almost) 100 000 words story, which i am slowly trying to finish. I wonder what Gallimard will make of it....
Apart from forcing me to write, boredom in ethiopia has made me pretty much addicted to television. Once Jay and Sujata have been put to bed, at around 2030 hr, I settle for tv. I guess it's denial of reality, but since the past year,i plunge in the world of dr house or jack "hang them high" McKoy ( the ADA in Law and Order) to escape from the murky intrigues of the african union.
Yesterday saw me glued to tv until one in the morning, I was watching a riveting movie called "Frost/Nixon". it's a dramatic re enactment of the famous interview of nixon by british talk show host david frost in 1976. Basically, it's the journalistic equivalent of "Rocky". David Frost, a talk show with some career problems, risks his personal fortune to buy 25 hours of interview time with Nixon, who has been living in isolation since resigning from the presidency in (72 ?). Nixon sees the interview as a way to show himself in a favourable light, coz he believes that Frost is an intellectual lightweight and cannot corner him with difficult questions.
American channels are reluctant to buy the interview coz they also believe that Frost is no match for the awesome intellectual power of Nixon, a man who once stood up to Khrustchev's bullying ( the famous "kitchen conversation" in 53), held tough political debates against JFK ( in 62) and negociated arms reductions treaties with Brezhnev, not to mention his extraordinary visit to China, etc.
And at first, Nixon does makes mincemeat out of Frost, evading questions, throwing homilies, self serving anecdotes, and just looking grander and out of reach from the poor Brit. But in a dramatic last minute round, Frost is able to corner Nixon about Watergate, and have him admit that he "let down the American people", and capture him as a tortured, tenebrous and lonely figure.
I have this odd fascination for Nixon, as one of these archetypal capricornian figures, to me he is one of the people who capture the best and the worst of that sign. The best: his enormous political endurance, his giant intellect ( he could have been one of the greatest ever presidents. Even with Watergate, his record as a statesman is pretty impressive). The worst: his penchant for shady deals, backroom intrigue, his rancour and jealousy. He was famously ill at ease with people, clumsy and aloof. Maybe Samantha in Sex and the City had a point, when she said: "Presidents should be good looking. Look at Nixon, he could not fuck anyone, so he fucked the country".
It's extraordinary that 30 years later, people should still be interested enough in nixon, to make such a film as "frost/nixon" ( it came out in 2008). I wonder if young people have even ever heard of Nixon or of Kissinger.
The strange thing about Nixon was his rancour against "the establishment" and "the snobs". He had this enormous envy and hatred of the East Coast families, of JFK's good looks and charm. Maybe it was a souvenir from his college years. After high school, he got admission to Harvard and Yale but could not go there coz his family was too poor. He went to Whittier college instead, a small college in California. However, afterwards he got a scholarship to Duke University, a place pretty full of rich kids. Something really bad must have happened there.
What I don't get about the guy was why, after he had achieved so much, could he still let his feelings of envy and insecurity make him abase himself to low acts. How could he, on the one hand, be a giant statesman that opens China to the world, that calms tension in the Middle East and negociate historic disarmament treaties with the USSR, and yet despite all that, still be insecure enough that come the elections in 1972, he felt the need to create a committee of thugs to sabotage the democrat party ( the "Committee to Re elect the President") ? What was the need to send burglars to the headquarters of the Democrat party in the Watergate hotel ? When in fact, he won his re election with a landslide victory ?
23 may 2010
notes from watching tv:
sex and the city vs desperate housewives: I'm interested in that off voice at the end of each desperate housewife episode, which gives a sort of moral summary to each episode. that pattern started in the first season, with the ghost of the murdered woman who makes comments on the lies of the living. you gather the impression that the creators of the series want to give a sort of moral compass to the series, maybe as a reaction to "sex and the city" which is seen as too hedonistic.
actually sex and the city seems to me to be a fusion of two different genres. the first one is sexual comedy, which is about as old as humanity itself. at the greek theatre, for example, tragedies were played together with bawdy comedies in which the actors wore big wooden penis, about which they made jokes. sex is an activity which lends itself to comedy, given the height of the expectations, and the reality of the performance. the second strand in sex and the city is the novel of feelings and relationships, whose most famous writer is jane austen. you see it especially in those moments when sarah jessicah parker, the would be jane austen of the series, writes some question on the blue screen of her computer. that moment of introspection is always followed by a scene of bedroom comedy, involving one of her sidekicks. i guess the alternation of these two genres in each episode of the series gave it its dynamism.
in the long run, the irritating thing about sex and the city is sarah jessica parker's ( i forgot the name of the character she plays) obsession with glamour. there's a scene in one episode, in which she goes to a wedding, and she watches longinly at the male guests ("schoolmates from dalton, philips, andover" her voice-over says wistfully).
the four women are all after rich men, i'm not saying it as a reproach, my point is that: in the case of the three others, samantha, the redhair and the brunette, in a way, they're entitled to it, because samantha owns a pr company, the redhair is a graduate from harvard law, and the brunette is a rich heiress, from a boston brahmin family. but s.j. parker ( was her character called carey? ) is just a newspaper columnist. the way she drags herself to the heels of mr big, begging him to care for her - i feel like telling her: forget it, girl, this man is just out of your league. mr big is a mirage for her, i would say his full name is : Big Apple. He embodies everything she longs for, in that city, and is reflected in her obsessive shoe-buying.
walt disney cartoons. in french "disney" has a pejorative connotation, to denote a work of art which is seen as excessively cute, oppressively wholesome and a bit hypocritical. there's also the image of the disney company as a media empire which brainwashes you with an endless stream of sanitised, feel-good products. but was it always like that ? I've recently watched two old disney classics, dumbo and pinochio. they don't look shallow and commercial to me, i think there was a real feeling to these cartoons. while being children's cartoons, they do carry quite some sadness with them. especially you can feel the loneliness of gepeto, the puppet maker who creates pinnochio. and then there's the famous scene where dumbo visits his mother, who's being put in a cage as being a mad elephant. i think the guys who made these cartoons were children of the Great Depression of the 1930's, and they really knew what it was like to be poor, sad and lonely. i suspect disney lost its feel somewhere in the 1950's, at around the time when they opened disneyworld park in california, and became a money making machine, in a 1950's america that was obsessed with consumption.
george of the jungle. it's the title of a cartoon i sometimes watch with my son on cn channel. it's an update on the tarzan myth. while the original tarzan character was the archetypal macho character, his successor ( george) is depicted as a sort of moron, who lives a quasi domestic life with two (?) teenage girls. why two ? i don't know. and the nature of his relationship with them is rather unclear, but it's not a romantic relationship. the two girls sometimes seem to be big sisters, and at other times are maternal or manipulative towards him. in any case, his real friends are a gorilla and an elephant. I wonder whether it all reflects the ambiguity of gender models in our times, or if i'm reading too much into that cartoon.
18 may 2010
thinking of the 60's
Such eloquence. This is an improvised speech made by Robert Kennedy in 1968, minutes after learning the assassination of martin luther king jr. He was on his way to a public meeting and was told about the assassination, and was advised not to go to the meeting, as the audience was mostly black, and in a dangerous neighbourhood. He insisted on going to the meeting and said this:
Ladies and Gentlemen - I'm only going to talk to you just for a minute or so this evening. Because...
I have some very sad news for all of you, and I think sad news for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.
Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings. He died in the cause of that effort. In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it's perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in.
For those of you who are black - considering the evidence evidently is that there were white people who were responsible - you can be filled with bitterness, and with hatred, and a desire for revenge.
We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization - black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion and love.
For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.
But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond these rather difficult times.
My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He once wrote: "Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."
What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.
(Interrupted by applause)
So I ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King, yeah that's true, but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love - a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke. We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times. We've had difficult times in the past. And we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; and it's not the end of disorder.
But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings that abide in our land.
(Interrupted by applause)
Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.
Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people. Thank you very much. (Applause)
When you listen the audio version, you get a much better sense of the degree to which this speech is spontaneous.
These Kennedys, they were really something. The whole 60’s period in the US fascinates me. Especially that, because there is so much material available as it is a modern period, yet at the same time, with the passage of time, it is acquiring the patina of legend. I remember reading transcripts from the oval office during the Cuban crisis. At one moment, the President is alone with his brother Robert, and they exchange a few words: “How is it going ?” “It is looking pretty bad”, followed by a silence. You can feel the tension of those moments.
I have this impossible dream of a sort of mystical novel, taking place in the 60’s in a parallel kind of US. Throughout the novel, we hear the voice of Walter Conkrite, who is God ( in his obituary in the Economist last year, the journalist said: “Throughout the 60’s, American listened before going to bed to his voice, telling them about the state of the country, and of the world. It was as if, Walter Conkrite was God”). The novel would start with the Nixon Kennedy television debate, and end with the landing of Appolo 11 on the moon. In it, the different regions of the US would have distinct colours to their sky and earth: New England ( black, cloudy sky, deep green earth), MidWest ( grey sky, grass green earth), South ( hot, moist white sky, red earth), West ( shining blue sky, yellow earth) California ( golden sky and earth). The heroes would be a travelling preacher and a housewife from a 1950’s tv series, dressed like Wilma in the Flintstones. There would be an alien invasion, with flying saucers just like in a comic book of the time. There would be a very long sequence taking place at night in the immense basement of a skyscraper in New York, which would be like an underground city in which people live in at night, to escape from some danger above the ground. The aliens would arrive on earth following the discovery of Lovecraft’s Necronomicon in the library of an Ivy League university ( someone reads the incantations from the book, which opens a crack through the dimensions). The Beatles would land on the East Coast as mystical bards, emerging from a yellow submarine, and would chase away the aliens, with the help of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood.
17 may 2010
'bout the master disciple relationship
I wonder whether it’s possible to have a master –apprentice relationship between writers. I don’t know many examples of that. There’s Maupassant, who used to visit his uncle Flaubert. I also heard of Naipaul acting as “guru” over Paul Theroux when they were together at Makerele university in Uganda but it seems more to have been an exercise in bullying (Naipaul: “What are you reading ?” Theroux : [some novel] Naipaul: “Throw this away. Read Thomas Mann, Death in Venice”).
Most people know how to write, in the basic meaning of the term. What technique would you learn from another writer ? Of course, every writer is influenced by the style of some other writers, especially those he read in his early years. But it’s hard to imagine one writer teaching another how to write a dialogue or an opening scene.
Other art forms lend themselves more readily to the master apprentice relationship. Painting, sculpture, music spring immediately to mind.
Maybe this difference between writing and the other arts tells us something about the nature of writing itself. Maybe writing is a kind of inferior art, if there is so little that one writer can transmit to another.
Or maybe we rarely find writers who consciously take their writing to the level of a fine art. Proust and Flaubert are examples of writers with a deliberately ornate style. It is interesting that we can easily associate each of these writers with the graphic style which was in fashion in their days. In the case of Proust, his style reminds us of Art Nouveau in its languid and ornate embellishments. There is an overripe smell about Proust’s writing, and the feeling of a civilization that has reached its summit, and whose elite are now languishing in the fumes of opium, in a bordello. In the case of Flaubert, his writings, especially Salammbo and the Tentation de St Antoine inevitably bring to mind the heavy symbolist paintings of Gustave Moreau. There is the feeling of a mind which is screaming to escape from the fumes of the Industrial Revolution and reach back to a fantasy land of antique orgies and barbaric wars.
But few writers can achieve such levels of ornate artistry, maybe because of lack of time, due to publishers' demands, or simply because most writers do something else to earn a living. or even, most
writers are afraid of going to the extremes which really intense writing will demand. you think of james joyce toiling at "ulysses" in utter poverty, while his daughter is slowing going mad, and he himself is losing his eyesight. or of thomas pynchon, living a life of seclusion to write "gravity's rainbow", and probably going to the limits of mental sanity too.
I guess what writers can give to each other is encouragement and some advice. This is actually something very important because writing a novel can take years, without you knowing whether your manuscript is interesting.
but i guess i do envy people in other artistic fields, who are able to have an "initiation" into a skill by an elder master. there's something noble about the idea, which brings us back to the medieval guilds.
One example of a master disciple relationship which has fascinated me for some time, is the meeting between jean renoir and satyajit ray. Renoir (who was the son of the famous painter, Auguste Renoir, and was himself one of the Great Film Directors of cinema history) came to Calcutta in 1949 to shoot “The River”. There, he met Satyajit Ray who was a graphic artist in an advertising company, and he more or less taught him the basics of film making, and gave Ray encouragement about his project to shoot “Pather Panchali”.
What I find fascinating about that meeting is the two drastically different cultures the two men came from, and the fact that they still could communicate about their love of cinema. I always imagine Jean Renoir as coming straight from that harsh world of 1930’s Paris. Ever since the days of Hemingway and ScottMcFitzgerald, Americans have always imagined Paris to be “A moveable feast”. But the 1930’s France you see in the films of Carné like “Le jour se lève” and “Quai des Brumes” is a grey world of factories, peopled by tough orphans and war veterans. You also feel that toughness in the voice of Edith Piaf, and in the characters played by Jean Gabin, and also in the poetry of Jacques Prévert.
I imagine Ray coming, on the other hand, growing up in the rather cozy world of well-off Indians ( his father and grandfather were leading intellectuals of Bengali society), with maids and gardeners at the family’s service. He was on to a pretty comfortable life, even if his job at the advertising agency was not so well paid. But instead, he went on, with considerable courage, to shoot Pather Panchali largely from his own money, and with inexperienced crew and amateur actors. With all those difficulties, the film actually took three years to be completed, with shooting only taking place whenever he had scraped enough money.
Ah well, that’s the kind of stories which have the stuff of legend about them.
6 may 2010
on this rainy day in addis ababa, while our glorious mauritian republic goes through yet another election (with the same people in the forefront) , let's go for some serious navel gazing. after all those years where i've been surfing the web, it seems to me i'm reaching the contours of myself. ah mean, more and more ah'm googling the same stuff, so in that sense the web has helped me to know what i'm interested in ( following is a list in random order. i probably forgot some stuff):
- irak. i'd like to know whether it will become the arab world's first big democracy or another saddam type will take power.why can't the arabs have a genuine, stable democracy, i keep wondering.
- world war 2 fighter planes. spitfires, hurricanes, messerschmidt. battle of britain in general. it's a heroic fantasy from childhood.
- new york, its neighbourhoods, its administration, its history. also upstate new york and new england in general. i like the idea of old puritan cemeteries, villages with history of witch hunting, ivy league universities holding dark secrets in their frat libraries.
- demographic trends of mauritius. fascinating subject which nobody bothers about. we have low fertility rate and high rate of emigration. at this rate, our population will start shrinking in the next 20 years or even before. what happens then ? new coolies ?
-zadie smith, john updike. pure envy.
-astronomy, especially terraforming of mars. an extension of my dreams to emigrate.
- christian heresies, and christian dogma in general. i'm fascinated with heresies because of the "what if ?" question. suppose the heretics had won the political battle and become the mainstream ? out of this, a growing interest in byzantium, the forgotten empire.
In general, I think I'm interested in lost glory, forgotten ideas and empires, fading states. i like the idea of the strange artefact, washed up ashore a river bank, from some long forgotten culture which was once powerful. Examining it, we discover another way of thinking, and we realise that our way of life could have been different, had that other culture won some battle, or had had some better king at the crucial moment.
as a counterpart to that, i also like the idea of new countries ( US, Australia, Canada, maybe Mars, one day).
18 april 2010
'bout the nature of evil
I am having a bit of an unhealthy curiosity about francisco macias nguema, the first president of equatorial guinea. the man was one of the worst tyrants in history, basically killed everyone or every living thing far and near. under his rule from 1968 to 1979, a third of his small country's population was killed or ran away (even his wife ran away). he abolished the national bank and took all the money to his house in his village. he abolished public schools. he abolished the catholic church and basically declared himself a living god. he forbid the use of the word "intellectual" and basically killed anyone in his country who could read and write. he forbid fishing and fishing boats ( that one, ah dunno why). if any foreign cargo ship dared to venture into the harbour, he quickly had its cargo looted for himself. if any foreigner dared venture into the country, he or she was quickly kidnapped and only freed against ransom. i can't help ask myself: what if he had not been arrested and executed in 1979, by his chief of security ? could it be that he would have been the first ruler in history to have actually EMPTIED his whole country ? It was ( still is) a small country, with a small population and little wealth. Imagine that, a guy who actually killed and plundered so much, that in the end, there was NOBODY left and NOTHING to steal. What would he have done next ? Maybe my deeper question is, is there an end to evil, or does it just go on and on, into deeper perversion. It is a question about the nature of evil. In Goethe's Faust, Faust asks Lucifer about his nature, and Lucifer answers " I am a part of the primeval chaos, which hates creation". It's a beautiful definition, and also one which cannot be understood, because we cannot understand the primeval chaos ( our minds function according to categories and notions belonging to the nature of creation itself). It's also a frightening definition, because in oriental religions we tend to believe evil to be caused only by ignorance of one's divine nature. in christianity and islam, evil is seen as a rebellion against god by an angel, out of pride. but in goethe's definition, evil is more sinister, it aims not just to rebel, out of jealousy about man, or out of a rebellious spirit against god's power - it wants to destroy the very fabric of creation, maybe bring us back to the cosmic soup.
why are we fascinated by evil, and a bit bored or disdainful of goodness ?
Why are we fascinated by evil, is it because it is sexy and full of guilty pleasure ? why is goodness unsexy and not so popular ? I suspect that it's because evil KNOWS what it wants, knows what you want. It takes you there, whether you likes its methods or not. the problem with goodness is that it is clumsy. good intentions land us into trouble, all the time. good people do often a mess out of things. we often wonder about the mystery of evil, as if evil was a stain on the beautiful structure of the world. maybe we should rather wonder about the mystery of good. what does it really mean, to be a good person ? to do no harm to others ? ok, but what about their demands on you ? coz everyone wants something from you, and you want a lot from them too. we ask the moon from politicians, yet we know lots of them are selfish and vain people. we want goodness everywhere, from everyone, yet we are scared, rightly so, of people who want to create paradise on earth, through the words of marx or the bible or whatever. if good is such a pure power, why are we best served by political compromise, rather than the rule of good ?
7 may 2011
william and kate wedding
ah been thinking recently 'bout what a stroke of public relation genius the will and kate marriage was for the royal family. after years of being accused of being snobbish and too far removed from the common people, this was the best thing the royals could have done: marry the future king to a commoner, and yet at the same time a commoner who actually looks much more regal and sophisticated than many in the royal family ( just compare kate to fergie).
ah think the response from the british public was pretty overwhelming in its warmth and goodwill, and that was coz it sprang from a deep root in what defines britishness: the good feeling which runs between their social classes. we all know how british society has well defined social classes, each with their own accent, habits and lifestyle. but a core aspect of british life has been the good natured relationship between these classes. according to whig historians, especially, that good relationship has been core to the great triumphs of great britain. it was this bond which enabled the british nobility to dismount from their horses at agincourt, to fight together with their bowmen and thus destroy the proud french nobility. again, it was british social harmony which meant that noble and seaman blended into such superb sailing teams in the royal navy, and sunk down the spanish fleet, where the soldiers treated sailors like galley slaves. most of all, it was this british ability for social classes to talk to each other which enabled the birth and growth of the mother of parliaments.
well anyway that's they whig thesis 'bout what makes britain great. anyway cheers to will and kate.
9 march 2011
'bout women's day ( one day late)
the world is becoming more feminine. it's a general feeling i have and which i guess others have too.
one curious example 'bout this is space exploration. a journalist once pointed out that up to the 70's, space exploration was all about some tough air force guys flying in space capsules, going to the moon, and scientists sending probes to the outer planets. however, the seventies saw the rise of the feminist and ecological movements, and by a curious process of influence, space exploration also became more inward-looking. skylab, the world's first space laboratory was sent into orbit. more and more satellites built for observation of the earth ( weather patterns, vegetation patterns, simple observation). the trend was no more towards colonisation of mars, but on the observation of mother earth, her moods and hiccups. space exploration has evolved from being "john wayne" to a more "touchy-feely" tone.
23 february 2011
two years in africa
yo it's been two years that ah'm in africa. ah'm sorry that ah'm gonna write touchy-feely stuff. bear with me.
plus side of the last two years in africa:
(i) the money. ah think most people go to work in africa coz of the expat allowances. or else, why come here ?
(ii) sometimes it's been interesting. in africa, a mauritian diplomat is a real diplomat. in europe, you spend your life picking up ministers at the airport to take them to the hotel. you're a nobody.
the minus side:
(i) extraordinary loneliness.
(ii) african towns suck. dirty and chaotic. no parks, no green areas.
(iii) the diseases. lots of them.
(iv) the crime. that one is more for mada. ethiopia is very safe.
about the interesting bits:
(i) at the AU, there was an interesting debate 'bout which one is more important: justice or peace ? should you seek justice against dictators or rebels who have made crimes, or make peace with them ? the fascinating aspect is that it was not a theoretical debate, but something that was happening every day in africa.
for example, uganda was contemplating at one point to make peace with the lord's resistance army. the most horrible of criminals. that would have meant an amnesty for joseph kony, their leader. but what about the victims ?
the International criminal court has issued a warrant of arrest against sudanese president omar al bashir for crimes against humanity, and war crimes in darfur. there was furious debate about this at the AU. basically, "muslim" countries (north and west afr) said (i) why not issue a warrant against israeli leaders for the war in gaza (ii) the warrant will complicate peace talks with darfuri rebels. "christian" countries (south and east africa) mainly supported the warrant arrest.
I was in the debate coz I participated in meetings re. the ICC. the passion with which each side defended its position was very striking. in particular, it's interesting to see that there are people in africa fighting for victims of atrocities to receive justice.
but should justice be at the cost of peace ? Later I met a very senior personality who told me: "what do they mean about justice ? We had to make peace with those criminals [there was a civil war in his country]. I personnally had to negociate with them and yet they have killed so many members of my family" and he added "There is no such thing as justice !"
In the case of his country, a union government was formed and amnisty was given to some people who had made some horrible crimes. yet, the formula has worked: that country is now peaceful.
(ii) another interesting bit: to see famous people. Or rather infamous people. Gaddafi: I've been in a room with him, late at night. Thank god there were other people in the room, ha ha. the man is not well in his head.
Talking of meeting people: i wish i had met more people here. there are interesting people in africa, like everywhere else. but of course it's so difficult, when you have work and have to take care of the family.
for example, there are two malagasy lawyers from harvard who do some pretty remarkable work here, they give lectures 'bout the new constitution, to explain its defects etc.
24 january 2011
the murder in the hotel
everyone's been talking of THAT murder in THAT hotel and they're talking talking 'bout death penalty, hang them high etc. ah'm thinkin' this way: instead of "hang them high", one big step we should take to address the social problems in mau would be to first ACCEPT that we are a modern society. it seems weird to say that but actually we in Mauritius don't accept that we have become a modern society. that's because the org socio culturelles keep telling us that basically we're a traditional, pious society and that of course there are problems but the remedy lies in prayer. the org socio have an approach of "exorcism" towards our social problems, ie that these problems are "demons" which can be exorcised by prayer and virtuous living.
there's nothing wrong with prayer and virtuous living but all the teenage mothers, drug addicts, sexual perverts, divorced couples, people with suicidal tendencies, etc in mauritius do also need the help of psychologists and therapists. But especially, we need first of all as a society to understand that we study our social problems in a methodical manner instead of relying on common wisdom and ethnic stereotypes. for example, we need social surveys on alcoholism ( what age do mauritians start drinking ? who first encouraged them to drink ? do rich or poor people drink more ? etc).
as a society we're very much afraid of doing surveys on social problems. i think we're afraid of annoying those horrible organisations socio culturelles. these guys will surely be livid with rage if one day the state does a survey on, say, divorce. why ? because according to their "traditional" approach, a social phenomenon like divorce should demonised and exorcised. whereas, when we do a social survey, we are suspending judgement and analysing the social phenomenon in a cool rational way. it's this shift in approach, from one of exorcism to analysis which the org socio culturelle are very afraid of.
yet it's clear that our society needs to wake up to the fact that it's become modern and suffers from the ills of modernity. and that it also needs to analyse its ills in a modern manner, being non judgemental, and analysing social phenomenon with parameters such as age, social class, psychological profiling, etc instead of considering any social problem as a "demon" and a "taboo" and someone who suffers from a problem as being "impure" and "sinful".
2 january 2011
two images of loneliness
two images of loneliness which have hanging in mah head these last few days:
the first one is of the last scenes in "the french lieutenant's woman" that movie with a young mery streep (yes, meryl streep was once young. how strange, i imagine her as having been forever middle aged and imperial), when the guy finally traces back the french lieutenant's woman. she's the governess in a house near a lake, and her employers are apparently modern, liberal people who know a bit about her past. the guy comes into her room upstairs, it's a room with a strangely modern look, not in a pleasant way: cold, bare and rather ugly. and something of the ugliness of that room tells us about the woman herself : she has escaped the horrors of victorian society, has found a job, she is free and lonely. the ending is "happy" in that they are reunited, but there is also something eerie about it. the furniture in that room makes one feel as if they have travelled in time, out of victorian times into the early 20th century.
the second image is that of the last moments in sissi's life. she is walking on the quay along the shore of lake leman in geneva, when a young man approaches her and stabs her heart with a thin knife. the knife is so thin, that at first she believes she has been punched. the man runs away, and she continues her walk. it's only when she comes aboard her boat that she collapses and dies.
elizabeth of wittelsbach, better known as sissi, empress of austria and queen of hungary, was in so many ways a forerunner of the typical woman of the 20th century: she freed herself from convention, she was not a little bit obsessed with her looks (she invented a private gym, and also suffered from anorexia). there is something touching, in that image of her walking incognito on the streets just before her death - like the french lieutenant's woman, she has achieved freedom, with a touch of loneliness. but of course, that final scene of her life has a grander pathos, because it seems like the prologue to so many of the horrors of the 20th century - which would engulf her husband, emperor francis joseph. maybe her death was an act of mercy by god, to spare her that vision.
25 september 2010
what the pope's visit to the uk got me musing about
so the pope's been to england and has beatified cardinal newman. ah haven't read cardinal newman's spiritual autobiography, the Pro Vita Sua though it's high on my must-read list, it's considered one of the great prose masterpieces of the english language.
thinking of cardinal newman has stirred some old longings in mah tired heart; on the one hand, it has briefly revived my episodic desire to convert to catholicism, a creeping desire which i've been having for the past ah dunno, five or more years, i think. ah like catholicism, ah like the old creaking structure of it, the lies, the power games of the cardinals, the nobility of soul of (some) priests and monks. it's only a lingering feeling of loyalty to the goddess durga that keeps me within the fold of hinduism. i like the virgin mary, i very much like to read the litany of loreto from time to time. but the goddess has her hold on me.
but the pope's visit to england has also stirred in me an old, old feeling for longing for that country. My interest for england goes back to the days when some of friends from high school went to study there. and i remember reading one morning in the culture page of l'express about zadie smith's first novel, "white teeth", with a photo of her (lovely girl), and i sighed at the idea of how exciting it would be there, in that magical place where black people and indian people and whatever could publish fresh, funny exciting books. london felt like the place where it was all happening, where salman rushdie and ben okri and kazuo ishiguro and michael ondaatje all converged to.
ah've only been there for a few days, a long time ago. to make matters worse, in a way, ah stayed in the house of the aunt of a friend of mine, and the aunt was quintessentially british, she had studied latin in cambridge ( they say "read" not "studied" in oxbridge, i think), was the descendant of an old line of latin lecturers in cambridge, actually, had two cats called homer and hercules. i'm saying it made matters worse because it was just so exactly the best of britain - so strongly itself, and hospitable at the same time. i was a paying guest, but for a very nominal fee. the other paying guest was an iranian student whom i never met.
actually many things felt exactly like i imagined they would be. london had precisely the grey dull weather and architecture that it's supposed to have. the milkman delivered his bottles in a funny little green eletric car, in the suburb where i lived- rows of houses, with narrow little living rooms inside. a crowded island. but british girls were much prettier than i expected ( i had expected horse faced creatures, like princess margaret). it was a bit like in japan, where i had expected the women to be all ravishing beauties, and the men to be little toothy gnomes, carrying suitcases half their height. actually i found japanese men to be rather taller, smarter and more handsome than i thought, and the girls were mostly ordinary, and didn't wear outlandish fashion, but then i didn't go to ginza.
it was a short visit, of only three days during which i bought about 10 kg of books in a second hand bookstore, and visited the british museum. i wondered once more, while i was there, what it would have been to actually have studied there. to have my character shaped by the british mould, like those mauritians who've been there - some of whom, for the rest of their lives bear an air of unfathomable gloom and boredom in the presence of others. the oxford air of effortless superiority and lassitude in being in the company of others.
actually i wonder whether the pinched snobbish air we always associate with the british is not a bit of a myth. isn't it just the style of some of the upper class ? and were the british upper class always like that ? i've been reading the history of the british kings since 1707 ( the year of the actual creation of the united kingdom, by the act of union). You think of George IV ( king from 1820 to 1830), infamous for his life of dissipation and wild extravagance. Even his successor, the more moderate, down to earth William IV (1830 -1837) , did bring nine illegitimate children to the altar when he got married at the age of 50, to the young princess Adelaide of Saxe Meiningen, aged 25 ( the marriage was apparently a happy one and the young princess took care of the illegitimate children, one of whom is the ancestor of the present British Prime Minister David Cameron). When William IV's niece Victoria ascended the throne, she decided to put an end to the wild lifestyle of the British royals and that's how we've had the victorian age of primness.
I think another source from which we get the idea of the british as prim and prudish is from reading jane austen. But the world she describes, of young girls from country gentry going to balls and trying to get married, is just one facet of the great britain of the 1800's. What about London, where an estimated 10 % of the female population worked as prostitutes ? These were the days of Emma, Lady Hamilton, probably the world's first supermodel. Lady Hamilton was born in a blacksmith's home, and from the age of 12 became a maid, then an "entertainer" for a dissolute man called Sir Harry Featherstonhaugh, who apparently liked to make her dance naked on the table for his guests. A young noble called Greville promptly fell in love with her - she was a great beauty and had become a famous model for artists- but when he decided to look for a wealthy bride to marry, he sent her basically as a gift to his elderly uncle Sir William Hamilton, the British Ambassador to Naples. He thus hoped to gratify himself with the uncle, and get a good mention in the latter's will. However the old Ambassador promptly also fell in love with her and married her, thus making her Lady Hamilton. In the meantime, she had become famous across Europe for her "Attitudes", poses she made at dinner parties in greek dress, to which guests had to guess the classical figure she was referring to. She actually started the fashion for greek dresses, which we see in paintings of women of those days, like the famous portrait of Juliette Recamier. lIn the middle of all this jolly scene in Naples arrived Lord Nelson, the naval hero and it is said that on their first meeting Lady Hamilton literally fainted in his arms, probably more out of admiration of his heroism than of his physical beauty, for he had been to sea since the age of 12, and his hair was white from sea salt, his skin was wrinkled like parchment, his teeth had been knocked out by scurvy, and he had one hand blown out by a french cannonball. Lady Hamilton, Sir William Hamilton and Lord Nelson then moved to London where they soon settled in a happy menage a trois which scandalised and fascinated all London.
So all this to say that the British are certainly not as prim as we often think them to be, and also that the likes of Lady Di and Prince Harry are actually very tame compared to what the British upper class used to be.
But to come back to my feelings about the UK, I can say it's a country I would love to know more about. London strikes me as one of the few truly international cities in the world, along with Singapore, Dubai and New York, cities which thrive on diversity. The UK has survived the anguish of the loss of empire by opening and mixing British culture with that of the immigrants who have settled there, thus making this country a thriving modern hub. Far from losing its own identity, it has kept a very strong national personality. I think it's a country which will still keep a vibrant presence in the world for the next 100 years.
16 june 2010
FDR the great aquarius ?
Writing 'bout Nixon as the archetypal capricorn has made me think of FDR. If N was the great (or terrible) capri, then was FDR the great aquarius ? Aquarians often have faces of striking nobility: great foreheads, aquiline noses, a grave, profound look. FDR had oodles of that. I especially love a photo of him, on the deck of the HMS Prince of Wales off the coast of Newfoundland in 41 , during his secret meeting with Churchill. He is staring away from the camera ( just like in the famous Yalta photo), like he's looking for someone, I wonder if it wasn't a politician's trick of offering his best face angle, because he must have known that he had such a striking profile. Meanwhile, Churchill is stodgily chomping his cigar, looking rather smug and crude ( I don't like Churchill very much).
Apart from the great looks, Aquarians believe very much in the brotherhood of humanity, and FDR was basically the founder of the UN. Interestingly, the other great believer in the UN at the time was his secretary of state Cordell Hull, a Libra. The UN charter was drafted by Hull and his staff.
FDR and Hull must have been quite a fascinating pair: FDR, the East Coast aristocrat par excellence, born in the lap of wealth and privilege, made an arranged marriage with a woman of distinction in her own right, basically the kind of man Nixon hated and envied from the depth of his soul. Hull, on the other hand, was the archetypal, almost mythological American: born in a log cabin in the depths of tennessee, on land given to his ancestors for distinguished service during the war of independence. Probably went to school barefoot, a la Tom Sawyer. Was admitted to the bar as a teenager, a bit like Lincoln, and was elected chairman of the clay county democrat party at the age of 19. Served as a captain in the tennessee volunteer infantry in the spanish american war.
When you add to the two of them Vice President Truman, the typical small town politician from Kansas with its gangsters and bootleggers, you have a pretty interesting cross section of american society of the time.
But among the three, it is to FDR that the eye naturally turns to: the grand statesman, looking not diminished, but ennobled by his wheelchair. I wonder if God was not merciful to him, when he made him die in 1945, sparing him from having to decide whether to drop the atomic bombs on Japan. What would he have decided ? How do you drop an atomic bomb on people, and then go on to found the UN ? You would look like a hypocrite.
Got to go to bed.
15 june 2010
nixon, the archetypal capricorn
One and a half years in ethiopia. Not a bad place, once you get used to some discomforts. It is much more a place for young people and people of an adventurous disposition, in general. If you are here with children, there's not many places to go to. I've been seriously bored here, on sundays !! The good side of it, is that this sunday boredom drove me to write this (almost) 100 000 words story, which i am slowly trying to finish. I wonder what Gallimard will make of it....
Apart from forcing me to write, boredom in ethiopia has made me pretty much addicted to television. Once Jay and Sujata have been put to bed, at around 2030 hr, I settle for tv. I guess it's denial of reality, but since the past year,i plunge in the world of dr house or jack "hang them high" McKoy ( the ADA in Law and Order) to escape from the murky intrigues of the african union.
Yesterday saw me glued to tv until one in the morning, I was watching a riveting movie called "Frost/Nixon". it's a dramatic re enactment of the famous interview of nixon by british talk show host david frost in 1976. Basically, it's the journalistic equivalent of "Rocky". David Frost, a talk show with some career problems, risks his personal fortune to buy 25 hours of interview time with Nixon, who has been living in isolation since resigning from the presidency in (72 ?). Nixon sees the interview as a way to show himself in a favourable light, coz he believes that Frost is an intellectual lightweight and cannot corner him with difficult questions.
American channels are reluctant to buy the interview coz they also believe that Frost is no match for the awesome intellectual power of Nixon, a man who once stood up to Khrustchev's bullying ( the famous "kitchen conversation" in 53), held tough political debates against JFK ( in 62) and negociated arms reductions treaties with Brezhnev, not to mention his extraordinary visit to China, etc.
And at first, Nixon does makes mincemeat out of Frost, evading questions, throwing homilies, self serving anecdotes, and just looking grander and out of reach from the poor Brit. But in a dramatic last minute round, Frost is able to corner Nixon about Watergate, and have him admit that he "let down the American people", and capture him as a tortured, tenebrous and lonely figure.
I have this odd fascination for Nixon, as one of these archetypal capricornian figures, to me he is one of the people who capture the best and the worst of that sign. The best: his enormous political endurance, his giant intellect ( he could have been one of the greatest ever presidents. Even with Watergate, his record as a statesman is pretty impressive). The worst: his penchant for shady deals, backroom intrigue, his rancour and jealousy. He was famously ill at ease with people, clumsy and aloof. Maybe Samantha in Sex and the City had a point, when she said: "Presidents should be good looking. Look at Nixon, he could not fuck anyone, so he fucked the country".
It's extraordinary that 30 years later, people should still be interested enough in nixon, to make such a film as "frost/nixon" ( it came out in 2008). I wonder if young people have even ever heard of Nixon or of Kissinger.
The strange thing about Nixon was his rancour against "the establishment" and "the snobs". He had this enormous envy and hatred of the East Coast families, of JFK's good looks and charm. Maybe it was a souvenir from his college years. After high school, he got admission to Harvard and Yale but could not go there coz his family was too poor. He went to Whittier college instead, a small college in California. However, afterwards he got a scholarship to Duke University, a place pretty full of rich kids. Something really bad must have happened there.
What I don't get about the guy was why, after he had achieved so much, could he still let his feelings of envy and insecurity make him abase himself to low acts. How could he, on the one hand, be a giant statesman that opens China to the world, that calms tension in the Middle East and negociate historic disarmament treaties with the USSR, and yet despite all that, still be insecure enough that come the elections in 1972, he felt the need to create a committee of thugs to sabotage the democrat party ( the "Committee to Re elect the President") ? What was the need to send burglars to the headquarters of the Democrat party in the Watergate hotel ? When in fact, he won his re election with a landslide victory ?
23 may 2010
notes from watching tv:
sex and the city vs desperate housewives: I'm interested in that off voice at the end of each desperate housewife episode, which gives a sort of moral summary to each episode. that pattern started in the first season, with the ghost of the murdered woman who makes comments on the lies of the living. you gather the impression that the creators of the series want to give a sort of moral compass to the series, maybe as a reaction to "sex and the city" which is seen as too hedonistic.
actually sex and the city seems to me to be a fusion of two different genres. the first one is sexual comedy, which is about as old as humanity itself. at the greek theatre, for example, tragedies were played together with bawdy comedies in which the actors wore big wooden penis, about which they made jokes. sex is an activity which lends itself to comedy, given the height of the expectations, and the reality of the performance. the second strand in sex and the city is the novel of feelings and relationships, whose most famous writer is jane austen. you see it especially in those moments when sarah jessicah parker, the would be jane austen of the series, writes some question on the blue screen of her computer. that moment of introspection is always followed by a scene of bedroom comedy, involving one of her sidekicks. i guess the alternation of these two genres in each episode of the series gave it its dynamism.
in the long run, the irritating thing about sex and the city is sarah jessica parker's ( i forgot the name of the character she plays) obsession with glamour. there's a scene in one episode, in which she goes to a wedding, and she watches longinly at the male guests ("schoolmates from dalton, philips, andover" her voice-over says wistfully).
the four women are all after rich men, i'm not saying it as a reproach, my point is that: in the case of the three others, samantha, the redhair and the brunette, in a way, they're entitled to it, because samantha owns a pr company, the redhair is a graduate from harvard law, and the brunette is a rich heiress, from a boston brahmin family. but s.j. parker ( was her character called carey? ) is just a newspaper columnist. the way she drags herself to the heels of mr big, begging him to care for her - i feel like telling her: forget it, girl, this man is just out of your league. mr big is a mirage for her, i would say his full name is : Big Apple. He embodies everything she longs for, in that city, and is reflected in her obsessive shoe-buying.
walt disney cartoons. in french "disney" has a pejorative connotation, to denote a work of art which is seen as excessively cute, oppressively wholesome and a bit hypocritical. there's also the image of the disney company as a media empire which brainwashes you with an endless stream of sanitised, feel-good products. but was it always like that ? I've recently watched two old disney classics, dumbo and pinochio. they don't look shallow and commercial to me, i think there was a real feeling to these cartoons. while being children's cartoons, they do carry quite some sadness with them. especially you can feel the loneliness of gepeto, the puppet maker who creates pinnochio. and then there's the famous scene where dumbo visits his mother, who's being put in a cage as being a mad elephant. i think the guys who made these cartoons were children of the Great Depression of the 1930's, and they really knew what it was like to be poor, sad and lonely. i suspect disney lost its feel somewhere in the 1950's, at around the time when they opened disneyworld park in california, and became a money making machine, in a 1950's america that was obsessed with consumption.
george of the jungle. it's the title of a cartoon i sometimes watch with my son on cn channel. it's an update on the tarzan myth. while the original tarzan character was the archetypal macho character, his successor ( george) is depicted as a sort of moron, who lives a quasi domestic life with two (?) teenage girls. why two ? i don't know. and the nature of his relationship with them is rather unclear, but it's not a romantic relationship. the two girls sometimes seem to be big sisters, and at other times are maternal or manipulative towards him. in any case, his real friends are a gorilla and an elephant. I wonder whether it all reflects the ambiguity of gender models in our times, or if i'm reading too much into that cartoon.
18 may 2010
thinking of the 60's
Such eloquence. This is an improvised speech made by Robert Kennedy in 1968, minutes after learning the assassination of martin luther king jr. He was on his way to a public meeting and was told about the assassination, and was advised not to go to the meeting, as the audience was mostly black, and in a dangerous neighbourhood. He insisted on going to the meeting and said this:
Ladies and Gentlemen - I'm only going to talk to you just for a minute or so this evening. Because...
I have some very sad news for all of you, and I think sad news for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.
Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings. He died in the cause of that effort. In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it's perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in.
For those of you who are black - considering the evidence evidently is that there were white people who were responsible - you can be filled with bitterness, and with hatred, and a desire for revenge.
We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization - black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion and love.
For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.
But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond these rather difficult times.
My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He once wrote: "Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."
What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.
(Interrupted by applause)
So I ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King, yeah that's true, but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love - a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke. We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times. We've had difficult times in the past. And we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; and it's not the end of disorder.
But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings that abide in our land.
(Interrupted by applause)
Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.
Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people. Thank you very much. (Applause)
When you listen the audio version, you get a much better sense of the degree to which this speech is spontaneous.
These Kennedys, they were really something. The whole 60’s period in the US fascinates me. Especially that, because there is so much material available as it is a modern period, yet at the same time, with the passage of time, it is acquiring the patina of legend. I remember reading transcripts from the oval office during the Cuban crisis. At one moment, the President is alone with his brother Robert, and they exchange a few words: “How is it going ?” “It is looking pretty bad”, followed by a silence. You can feel the tension of those moments.
I have this impossible dream of a sort of mystical novel, taking place in the 60’s in a parallel kind of US. Throughout the novel, we hear the voice of Walter Conkrite, who is God ( in his obituary in the Economist last year, the journalist said: “Throughout the 60’s, American listened before going to bed to his voice, telling them about the state of the country, and of the world. It was as if, Walter Conkrite was God”). The novel would start with the Nixon Kennedy television debate, and end with the landing of Appolo 11 on the moon. In it, the different regions of the US would have distinct colours to their sky and earth: New England ( black, cloudy sky, deep green earth), MidWest ( grey sky, grass green earth), South ( hot, moist white sky, red earth), West ( shining blue sky, yellow earth) California ( golden sky and earth). The heroes would be a travelling preacher and a housewife from a 1950’s tv series, dressed like Wilma in the Flintstones. There would be an alien invasion, with flying saucers just like in a comic book of the time. There would be a very long sequence taking place at night in the immense basement of a skyscraper in New York, which would be like an underground city in which people live in at night, to escape from some danger above the ground. The aliens would arrive on earth following the discovery of Lovecraft’s Necronomicon in the library of an Ivy League university ( someone reads the incantations from the book, which opens a crack through the dimensions). The Beatles would land on the East Coast as mystical bards, emerging from a yellow submarine, and would chase away the aliens, with the help of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood.
17 may 2010
'bout the master disciple relationship
I wonder whether it’s possible to have a master –apprentice relationship between writers. I don’t know many examples of that. There’s Maupassant, who used to visit his uncle Flaubert. I also heard of Naipaul acting as “guru” over Paul Theroux when they were together at Makerele university in Uganda but it seems more to have been an exercise in bullying (Naipaul: “What are you reading ?” Theroux : [some novel] Naipaul: “Throw this away. Read Thomas Mann, Death in Venice”).
Most people know how to write, in the basic meaning of the term. What technique would you learn from another writer ? Of course, every writer is influenced by the style of some other writers, especially those he read in his early years. But it’s hard to imagine one writer teaching another how to write a dialogue or an opening scene.
Other art forms lend themselves more readily to the master apprentice relationship. Painting, sculpture, music spring immediately to mind.
Maybe this difference between writing and the other arts tells us something about the nature of writing itself. Maybe writing is a kind of inferior art, if there is so little that one writer can transmit to another.
Or maybe we rarely find writers who consciously take their writing to the level of a fine art. Proust and Flaubert are examples of writers with a deliberately ornate style. It is interesting that we can easily associate each of these writers with the graphic style which was in fashion in their days. In the case of Proust, his style reminds us of Art Nouveau in its languid and ornate embellishments. There is an overripe smell about Proust’s writing, and the feeling of a civilization that has reached its summit, and whose elite are now languishing in the fumes of opium, in a bordello. In the case of Flaubert, his writings, especially Salammbo and the Tentation de St Antoine inevitably bring to mind the heavy symbolist paintings of Gustave Moreau. There is the feeling of a mind which is screaming to escape from the fumes of the Industrial Revolution and reach back to a fantasy land of antique orgies and barbaric wars.
But few writers can achieve such levels of ornate artistry, maybe because of lack of time, due to publishers' demands, or simply because most writers do something else to earn a living. or even, most
writers are afraid of going to the extremes which really intense writing will demand. you think of james joyce toiling at "ulysses" in utter poverty, while his daughter is slowing going mad, and he himself is losing his eyesight. or of thomas pynchon, living a life of seclusion to write "gravity's rainbow", and probably going to the limits of mental sanity too.
I guess what writers can give to each other is encouragement and some advice. This is actually something very important because writing a novel can take years, without you knowing whether your manuscript is interesting.
but i guess i do envy people in other artistic fields, who are able to have an "initiation" into a skill by an elder master. there's something noble about the idea, which brings us back to the medieval guilds.
One example of a master disciple relationship which has fascinated me for some time, is the meeting between jean renoir and satyajit ray. Renoir (who was the son of the famous painter, Auguste Renoir, and was himself one of the Great Film Directors of cinema history) came to Calcutta in 1949 to shoot “The River”. There, he met Satyajit Ray who was a graphic artist in an advertising company, and he more or less taught him the basics of film making, and gave Ray encouragement about his project to shoot “Pather Panchali”.
What I find fascinating about that meeting is the two drastically different cultures the two men came from, and the fact that they still could communicate about their love of cinema. I always imagine Jean Renoir as coming straight from that harsh world of 1930’s Paris. Ever since the days of Hemingway and ScottMcFitzgerald, Americans have always imagined Paris to be “A moveable feast”. But the 1930’s France you see in the films of Carné like “Le jour se lève” and “Quai des Brumes” is a grey world of factories, peopled by tough orphans and war veterans. You also feel that toughness in the voice of Edith Piaf, and in the characters played by Jean Gabin, and also in the poetry of Jacques Prévert.
I imagine Ray coming, on the other hand, growing up in the rather cozy world of well-off Indians ( his father and grandfather were leading intellectuals of Bengali society), with maids and gardeners at the family’s service. He was on to a pretty comfortable life, even if his job at the advertising agency was not so well paid. But instead, he went on, with considerable courage, to shoot Pather Panchali largely from his own money, and with inexperienced crew and amateur actors. With all those difficulties, the film actually took three years to be completed, with shooting only taking place whenever he had scraped enough money.
Ah well, that’s the kind of stories which have the stuff of legend about them.
6 may 2010
on this rainy day in addis ababa, while our glorious mauritian republic goes through yet another election (with the same people in the forefront) , let's go for some serious navel gazing. after all those years where i've been surfing the web, it seems to me i'm reaching the contours of myself. ah mean, more and more ah'm googling the same stuff, so in that sense the web has helped me to know what i'm interested in ( following is a list in random order. i probably forgot some stuff):
- irak. i'd like to know whether it will become the arab world's first big democracy or another saddam type will take power.why can't the arabs have a genuine, stable democracy, i keep wondering.
- world war 2 fighter planes. spitfires, hurricanes, messerschmidt. battle of britain in general. it's a heroic fantasy from childhood.
- new york, its neighbourhoods, its administration, its history. also upstate new york and new england in general. i like the idea of old puritan cemeteries, villages with history of witch hunting, ivy league universities holding dark secrets in their frat libraries.
- demographic trends of mauritius. fascinating subject which nobody bothers about. we have low fertility rate and high rate of emigration. at this rate, our population will start shrinking in the next 20 years or even before. what happens then ? new coolies ?
-zadie smith, john updike. pure envy.
-astronomy, especially terraforming of mars. an extension of my dreams to emigrate.
- christian heresies, and christian dogma in general. i'm fascinated with heresies because of the "what if ?" question. suppose the heretics had won the political battle and become the mainstream ? out of this, a growing interest in byzantium, the forgotten empire.
In general, I think I'm interested in lost glory, forgotten ideas and empires, fading states. i like the idea of the strange artefact, washed up ashore a river bank, from some long forgotten culture which was once powerful. Examining it, we discover another way of thinking, and we realise that our way of life could have been different, had that other culture won some battle, or had had some better king at the crucial moment.
as a counterpart to that, i also like the idea of new countries ( US, Australia, Canada, maybe Mars, one day).
18 april 2010
'bout the nature of evil
I am having a bit of an unhealthy curiosity about francisco macias nguema, the first president of equatorial guinea. the man was one of the worst tyrants in history, basically killed everyone or every living thing far and near. under his rule from 1968 to 1979, a third of his small country's population was killed or ran away (even his wife ran away). he abolished the national bank and took all the money to his house in his village. he abolished public schools. he abolished the catholic church and basically declared himself a living god. he forbid the use of the word "intellectual" and basically killed anyone in his country who could read and write. he forbid fishing and fishing boats ( that one, ah dunno why). if any foreign cargo ship dared to venture into the harbour, he quickly had its cargo looted for himself. if any foreigner dared venture into the country, he or she was quickly kidnapped and only freed against ransom. i can't help ask myself: what if he had not been arrested and executed in 1979, by his chief of security ? could it be that he would have been the first ruler in history to have actually EMPTIED his whole country ? It was ( still is) a small country, with a small population and little wealth. Imagine that, a guy who actually killed and plundered so much, that in the end, there was NOBODY left and NOTHING to steal. What would he have done next ? Maybe my deeper question is, is there an end to evil, or does it just go on and on, into deeper perversion. It is a question about the nature of evil. In Goethe's Faust, Faust asks Lucifer about his nature, and Lucifer answers " I am a part of the primeval chaos, which hates creation". It's a beautiful definition, and also one which cannot be understood, because we cannot understand the primeval chaos ( our minds function according to categories and notions belonging to the nature of creation itself). It's also a frightening definition, because in oriental religions we tend to believe evil to be caused only by ignorance of one's divine nature. in christianity and islam, evil is seen as a rebellion against god by an angel, out of pride. but in goethe's definition, evil is more sinister, it aims not just to rebel, out of jealousy about man, or out of a rebellious spirit against god's power - it wants to destroy the very fabric of creation, maybe bring us back to the cosmic soup.
why are we fascinated by evil, and a bit bored or disdainful of goodness ?
Why are we fascinated by evil, is it because it is sexy and full of guilty pleasure ? why is goodness unsexy and not so popular ? I suspect that it's because evil KNOWS what it wants, knows what you want. It takes you there, whether you likes its methods or not. the problem with goodness is that it is clumsy. good intentions land us into trouble, all the time. good people do often a mess out of things. we often wonder about the mystery of evil, as if evil was a stain on the beautiful structure of the world. maybe we should rather wonder about the mystery of good. what does it really mean, to be a good person ? to do no harm to others ? ok, but what about their demands on you ? coz everyone wants something from you, and you want a lot from them too. we ask the moon from politicians, yet we know lots of them are selfish and vain people. we want goodness everywhere, from everyone, yet we are scared, rightly so, of people who want to create paradise on earth, through the words of marx or the bible or whatever. if good is such a pure power, why are we best served by political compromise, rather than the rule of good ?
Stuff I've posted in My Notes in Facebook ( 6 april 2009 - 1 march 2010)
1 march 2010
l'immortel
Il etait ne il y a longtemps, dans un village de samarie. De temperament reveur, il suivit les pas de l'homme qu’ils appelaient Christ, et qui disait etre le Messie. Apres la sanglante fin de cette aventure, il se retira dans les montagnes de Syrie, et ecrivit,au fil des annees diverses versions de qu’avait dit et fait l’homme nommé Jesus. Comme il n’était qu’un hermite inconnu de tous, les gens attribuerent ses récits aux apotres, Jean , Matthieu, Luc et Marc. Lui même se souciait peu de cela, car il etait trouble par les differences qui etaient apparues a chaque fois qu’il avait redige ce qu’il appelait les chroniques du Christ. D’où venait, par exemple, l’épisode de la Samaritaine parlant au Christ, pres d’un puit ? Et celui du Christ et des enfants ? Avait-il vraiment eu lieu ? Pourtant ces images etaient là, flottant dans sa memoire – il se souvenait du roucoulement des colombes, ce matin où les pharisiens avaient apporté la femme adultère devant le Christ, qui dessinait dans le sable avec son orteil.
Plongé dans ses meditations, il ne sentit pas passer les années. Un jour, cependant, après bien des siècles, il descendit des montagnes et se rendit compte que tout avait change, les villes prospères n’étaient plus que des ruines, et d’autres avaient surgi à leur place , et les enseignements du Christ s’étaient gonflés en un culte où prospéraient, une nouvelle fois, les pretres et les rois. Comme autrefois. Décu, il se fit marchand, et partit vers les oasis brulantes d’Arabie.
Là bas,longtemps après, il rencontra un home qui se disait être le dernier des prophètes de Dieu. Il se dit que cette fois ci peut être, le monde pourrait devenir meilleur, et il devint un des compagnons du prophète. Après sa mort, il devint le calife, vivant simplement, comme l’avait fait le prophète, alors que les armées de la nouvelle religion atteignaient les frontières de la Chine lointaine, aux confins du monde.
Puis un matin, un roucoulement de colombes lui rappela ce matin, où le Christ avait jugé la femme adultère, et il se rappela aussi la fraicheur de sa cave, en Syrie.
Tout fut arrange très vite, on enterra un autre, vraiment mort celui là, tandis qu’il partit vers l’Orient, traversant le Rub al Khali pour atteindre les cotes d’Oman. Là, il se promena longtemps sur les quais émerveillé par le grincement des mats des boutres,.
Il apprit par des voyageurs la mort de Hassan et de Hussein, à la bataille de Kerbala, et comprit alors que rien ne changerait, les religions deviendraient toujours des affaires de pretres et de rois, pas de Dieu.
Alors il resolut de prendre la route des mers, ayant remarqué que les navires ne laissaient pas de traces derrière eux, tout comme lui aussi souhaitait se dissoudre, ayant tant vécu.
Une tempete se leva, et la boutre, partie longer les cotes d’Azanie, là où vivent les hommes noirs, ne fut bientot qu’une epave flottante, dans laquelles les hommes moururent tous – sauf lui. Il connut alors la plate horreur de la mer calme, dans laquelle il brulait sous le sel et l’eclat implacable du soleil, jusqu’a ce qu’apres plusieurs jours, il apercut les cotes de cette ile, que les marins nommaient Dina Mashriq, l’ile de l’Ouest.
La, il se plongea de nouveau dans ses meditations, qui devinrent de plus en plus morcelées,a mesure que passaient les siecles, de sorte que sa pensee prit la forme des vagues qui s’ecrasaient doucement contre le sable du lagon, ou celle des nuages en haut des mornes.
Un jour, cependant, les hommes arriverent sur l’ile, apportant avec eux leurs horreurs – d’autres hommes en chaine, la cupidité, leur rage de tout abattre, et de tout tuer . Il se refugia dans les forêts, effrayé.
Mais au fil des siècles, les hommes avancaient dans l’ile, et lui meme, n’ayant guère entendu de voix
humaine pendant tout ce temps , chercha a retrouver le reconfort des foules.
Il eut beaucoup d’enfants – la plupart des habitants de l’ile etaient ses descendants, sans le savoir.
Un jour, il se fit poete, et ecrivit un livre appelé “La Parole Testament”. Une vendeuse dans une librairie lui dit alors par erreur “ Oui monsieur, nous avons bien votre livre, le Nouveau Testament”
Et alors, il se rappela.
(avec toutes mes excuses a Borges, pour ce mauvais pastiche de son immortelle nouvelle, "les immortels")
note: the above was inspired by something which happened to my friend umar timol. he called a library to ask if they were distributing his new book "la parole testament". the salesgirl replied: "yes sir, we do have on our shelves your book Le Nouveau Testament"
27 february 2010
the idea of childhood
I'm wondering whether the people from before the victorians didn't maybe have some point in considering children as miniature adults. it's with the victorians, and their strong middle class family outlook, that we've discovered the world of childhood. maybe the roots of that came also from rousseau, blake and wordsworth. ah mean, at around the time of rousseau, the portraits of the nobility start to change, and instead of being portrayed alone, nobles are painted as a family. that was a novelty, because before that the rearing of children was left to maids, but during the 18th century, nobles started to project themselves as loving parents. maybe it was the influence of rousseau, ah dunno. afterwards we have blake writing "songs of innocence" ( but blake was considered a weirdo until the late 20th century, so maybe he wasn't influential), and wordsworth writing "the child is the father of man". with victorian society, middle class family life gradually became the standard reference, and people even start judging other styles of family life from the point of view of middle class morality. for example, when we look at "dallas" , we are watching all the adultery and tricks of upper class people, as something both sordid and entertaining, from our middle class perspective ( something which people even from the 1950's would have found profoundly strange, coz up to then you looked up at the upper class with an idea of imitating their elegance, their mannerisms, not to judge their family life). with that rise of the middle class family as the model, we also see the rise of the idea of the child as someone living in his own world, and with his own worldview. that's how we have the rise of children's books, like enid blyton, beatrix potter etc.
of course, children do need a literature adapted to their psychological and emotional development, they can't read violent or boring stuff, but when i look at some of the stuff in children's books i take at the library, i find it excessively cute and gentle. i wonder whether we don't exaggerate this idea of children being pure and fragile. children do have an innocence and there are some things which they are not supposed to know until they are teens, but in general i think this idea of kids having specific needs has become a bit of an industry.
got to go.
18 january 2010
About politics and story telling
These are some thoughts about politics and story telling. I’m sorry if the language is a bit rudimentary – I don’t have much time to polish it.
The links between politics and story telling are complex. All politics are to a certain degree, story telling: a politician defines himself by his “life story” which has to include some accomplishments. A government will tell you a “grand story” of its accomplishments. Nationalists have a grand narrative of their country’s glorious past. A writer or a film maker on the other hand will tell their own story, and that story will subvert the grand narratives of politics and religion to the extent that the writer/film maker’s story does not fit in these social narratives.
A writer/film maker can be self consciously ideological, and write stories which are overtly ideological and even didactic, or the ideology can be completely unconscious, to the extent that the writer isn’t really aware that he is making a political point.
Let us see two very different genres, in their “political coefficient”
An apolitical genre ? the Western
Westerns take place in the “naked” world of the Wild West of the 1860’s. This is a world of deserts and new towns, in which politics is at its most rudimentary: law and order is ensured by the sherif, more or less based on his personal judgment. The appeal of the Western lies precisely in this feeling that it takes place in a world of every man to himself. There is a recurring moment in westerns, which is maybe its defining moment: early in the movie, the hero comes in the saloon and for some reason, he is surrounded by the bad guy and his acolytes. They close around him, with their finger on the trigger. Then something happens- the sherif comes in, or the hero fires a single shot. But the feeling of physical danger, of raw intimidation which has been created pervades the rest of the movie.
In westerns, outsiders from the more civilised East coast or from Europe are usually shown as effeminate and cowardly. In Vera Cruz, the Austrian officer accompanying the treasure of the Emperor of Mexico is depicted as a pompous buffoon. This opposition between the wild west and the civilised East coast is dramatically depicted in “The man who killed Liberty Valance” with the rivalry between the lawyer (James Stewart ?) and the cowboy (John Wayne). The lawyer wins, as civilisation must do, but he is aggrieved by the defeat of the cowboy.
Curiously, many Westerns strike me as quasi spiritual movies, in the almost zen nakedness of their world view. The unnamed, laconic cowboy played by Clint Eastwood in Sergio Leone’s westerns is like a cousin of some wandering samurai in a japanese sword story: apolitical and lonely.
We usually associate westerns with conservative values: strongly traditional depiction of masculinity, negative depiction of American Indians. But westerns such as “The man who killed Liberty Valance” or “The good, the bad and the ugly” seem to me to be pretty apolitical. I think their charm comes precisely from their ideal of the cowboy as an embodiment of “pure” manhood, removed from the taints of politics and money, living from his gun and his lasso, in the desert.
A hyper political genre: science fiction
It is curious that science fiction should be such a densely political genre. One would think that the décor of outer space, with its remote stars and planets, would be far removed from the world of politics. Yet science fiction, maybe more than any other genre, brims with politics, overt and covert. The wild possibilities of outer space and futuristic machines are fertile ground for all kinds of political messages, as well as sexual and racial fantasies which come straight from racial and sexual politics.
It did not start that way. Jules Verne’s stories usually centered around an interesting machine – a submarine, a rocket – which would carry the heroes through wondrous adventures. However, soon came HG Wells’ “War of the Worlds”. Wells was a socialist, and the war of the worlds is a biting satire of colonialism, with its depiction of the ruthless extermination of our species by a more advanced alien race.
After HG Wells, the trend was set: science fiction has been the great political genre of the 20th century, abounding with cautionary tales about the dangers of unchecked scientific advance, or throwing back to us twisted sexual and racial fantasies which echo the sexual and racial politics of the century.
The cautionary tales are so many, and so famous, that I only need to mention a few: Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, Terminator ( about artificial intelligence), Gataca (about genetic manipulation).
The sexual and racial fantasies are less well known, and quite interesting. On race, there is the fascinating “mirror effect” between American and Japanese science fiction. In “Buck Rogers”, an American science fiction series of the 30’s , the US has been colonised by the hordes of a future Chinese empire, and only a free area, covering New England is free from the rule of the cruel and devious Chinese emperors. If you think the racial stereotypes are crude, then consider the view from the Asian side: in the Japanese animes I watched as a child, the world would be invaded by a race of ugly giant aliens who would throw atomic bombs on human cities, but humanity was defended by a giant robot (Goldorak) who wielded high tech weapons looking very much like traditional samurai weaponry. The defining moment in Japanese anime of those days was: the hero ( frail, long haired, androgynous) is pummelled by a huge, muscular baddy with a squarish face like a caricature of a white man. Finally the hero is thrown against a wall, crashes in it, blood spurts from his forehead and draws on his bandana the emblem of the Japanese Imperial Navy, his eyes go afire, he screams “Banzaiiiiiiiiiii” and bounds back to battle with his last breath.
Apart from the war of the races, science fiction has also been the battleground of the war of the sexes, and the most disturbing example of this is the “Alien” series. The first “Alien” came out in 1979, during the heyday of the feminist movement. Alien is not really a political movie as much as it is a powerful, bizzare metaphor on sexuality: the creature’s huge head is like a monstrous erect penis, its mode of reproduction ( fertilisation of human bodies, followed by a brutal, horrible bursting through the belly of the carrier) is a caricature of human reproduction. There is a powerfully sexual and nightmarish tension throughout the movie, as the creature hunts the girl (Ripley ?) throughout the space station.
Throughout the Alien series, there are scenes of the creature approaching Ripley while she is in bed (these long, flower like beds of the movie, with the room always lighted in a virginal white) or under a shower. And there are innumerable scenes of fertilisation, of bodies trapped in gluey matter, near pods which are going to bloom. Throughout this apocalyptic landscape of sex, there strides the valiant female warrior Ripley, muscular, heavily armed, virginal – yet in the later series, the creature does get to impregnate her ( but she throws herself in liquid metal, to destroy his offspring).
An obsession with politics: mauritian literature
The notion of mauritian literature is intimately associated, in the minds of many, with the left wing movements of the 70’s. “Mauricianisme” was a left wing movement, and the writers of those days wrote heavily political texts such as “Li”.
Maybe because of this hangover, whenever journalists interview writers in Mauritius, they would always ask question such as: “What is your book about ?” or “What were trying to say”. It is always assumed that a Mauritian writer is trying to deliver a message, when he writes a novel or a drama.
For a long time, I had trouble explaining to people that I was just telling a story when I wrote a novel, that my aim was a poetics, not an ideology. However, lately, there has been another trend: people would ask me “what’s is about, your story” but in such a light hearted way that I feel that they are just asking me some idea about the plot, but just to have an idea whether it sounds entertaining or not. This is the new generation, who think of culture only as some kind of light entertainment. They have grown up in a world full of entertaining movies and games, and are a bit light headed about culture. Suddenly, I find myself missing the days when writers were automatically considered as ponderous left wing intellectuals who wrote political tracts.
(to be continued, if I get more ideas)
16 december 2009
help for my new cult
I'm working hard to start up a carey lowell cult. but i'm facing theological difficulties. this particular cult revolves not specifically on the "normal" carey (former james bond girl,wife of richard gere, lives in the hamptons, practices tibetan buddhism) but on her alter ego jamie ross, assistant district attorney in " Law and order" (96-98 seasons), the ultimate tough, glacial, smart dominatrix. so, which metaphysical link shall we decrete to exist between carey and her acting persona ? two-in-one ( catholicism) ? two separate (arianism) ? to proceed from one to the other by initiatic steps (gnosticism) ? one is the manifestation of the other's latent powers (tibetan buddhism) ? one is the lila played by the other (vaishnavism) ? can someone help me on that one ? if you do, i'll appoint you as high priest of my cult (i'm it's pope).
15 august 2009
gardens
Yesterday Jay said: "I don't like Africa" "Why ?" "It's kind of old...." and he added "I'd like to go to another country where I've never been before". I'd like to get out of Addis Ababa too for some time.
Thank God we have a garden, it's our miniature countryside. I'm interested in gardens. Each civilisation had its style of garden; the arabs, with their rows of oranges and jasmine, and numerous fountains ( the arabs adored fountains, the freshness, the wetness, the gurgling of water appealed to them), the Chinese with their rockeries and zig zagging paths ( unfortunately I haven't had the chance to see the more beautiful Chinese gardens like the Garden of the Master of Nets, in Suzhou), the Persians, about whom I've heard that they have grassless gardens. We do not know what the gardens of ancient India were like, coz they've been replaced by Moghul style gardens, but they probably favoured clumps of trees in which to catch shade. In many cultures gardens are the cross roads between the physical and supernatural worlds.The word paradise comes from the Persian word for "grove". There is the Garden of Eden, a supernatural place in which a human drama of temptation unfolds. In Indian mythology, gardens are the place where nymphs seduce sages and kings, and where Krishna and Radha play. In Chinese literature, snake and fox women seduce heroes in gardens. Generally speaking, the forest is a place of raw danger, haunted by demons, and the palace is the world of intrigue. The garden is an intermediary place, of eroticism and surprise. Kings love to play at being shepherds , hence the pastoral amusement, beloved of marie antoinette. interestingly, some people claim to have seen the ghost of marie antoinette in remote parts of the trianon gardens, still disguised as a shepherdess. a garden is a make believe world, in which we play with a tamed nature and pretend to love "natural things" ( we do not, really - very few of us could cope with real nature, the jungle or the steppe). Gardens are ambivalent ( I like Clint Eastwood's film "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil"), places in which evil spirits can trick one ( or in which nowadays, junkies lurk) and also places of hidden love ( lovers flee to gardens, away from peeping eyes), yet theirs is a mild ambivalence. tragedies often take place in palaces, whereas the garden is the place of comedy. In gardens, we can play at bit at being God, by redoing the world the way we like it. Gardens, more than palaces, show us the milder and more endearing side of humanity.
7 august 2009
Similarities between chinese and indian mythology
1, Ne zha the child god is mischievous like Krishna. Krishna kills the demon snake living in the river, and Ne Zha kills the dragon king living in the sea. Ne zha was born during the reign of an evil king of the Shang dynasty, who tries to kill him. Krishna was born during the reign of the evil Kamsa.
2. Sun Wu Kong and Hanuman. Resemblance is obvious. Both monkey kings have enormous strength and can change size. Sun Wu kong is the disciple of Xuan Zang, Hanuman is the disciple of Rama. Both are bachelors. In his childhood, Hanuman swallowed the sun. In his youth, Sun went to war against the kingdom of heaven. Both became very wise in their old age.
3. The three Pandavas in mahabharata and the three sworn brothers in the three kingdoms. Yuddhishtira is like Liu Bei, wise and humane. However Liu Bei is a little bit cunning and sometimes pretends to be not interested in power. Arjuna is very much like Guan Gong. Both have superhuman skill with weapons, both are proud and hot blooded. Bhima is like the third brother ( forgot his name). Both have enormous strength and crude appetites ( very fond of food and wine). The pandavas are helped by Krishna, who sometimes uses supernatural powers. The three sworn brothers are helped by Zhu ge liang, who is both immensely wise and a bit of a magician.
11 July 2009
Conversations
giving ambitions to my kid
Jay has built a big lego airplane. Me: "That's a big airplane" Jay: "It's not an airplane, it's a scholarship" (after some minutes) Jay: "What's a scholarship ?" Me: "It's a very nice kind of ship. I hope you get into one, one day"
resourceful government
Yesterday, at the reception at US embassy. American diplomat "So, when is your wife getting the baby ?" Me: "Er, maybe it could be now. Do you have a free room ?" American diplomat: "Ahem, I'm afraid our doctor is not on duty" Me, to Serbian friend : "If she's born here, she gets the green card, right ?" Serbian friend "Well in 1942 the king of Yugoslavia was in exile in the US, and his wife was about to deliver her baby. However according to the Yugoslav constitution, the king had to be born in Yugoslavia. So the US president declared the hotel room in which the baby was being born as Yugoslav territory, for a few hours. So they might do the opposite" I thought of the American ambassador phoning to Obama to have him declare the room at the US embassy in which Sujata was being born, as Mauritian territory, and decided I didn't want to bother everyone like that.
5 July 2009
Below is an extract from a beautiful, impossibly difficult and complicated, unfinished story whose first part i lost long time a ago, let's call it "the meghna cycle" the main character was a girl ( later a prudish young woman) called meghna. who said ah can't do feminine writing, uh , uh , uh ? It's the beginning of the second part.the first part took place in her adolescence. ah read it to umar and azaghen long time ago at zorro's, in vacoas. this is the beginning of the second part, when meghna's in england.
" I was a nomad of the soul, always travelling from imaginary homeland to imaginary homeland. Wandering away from the silvery dew-kissed underwood of nostalgia, in the little hours of the morning, I would reach dreary flat badlands in those sad winter evenings in London. There is no water here, only the sound of water.
Wandering. There was nowhere to go back to. Nowhere worth mentioning. The bogged ship of motherland, stranded in the sandy shallows amidst the fog, was slowly rotting far away in the corners of my mind. A flying dutchman, manned by bogey crew, skips over the waves at night, flying the jolly roger once more. Here I am, a country pasted together, mummy of recollections, and fantasies.
Exile, brief, willed by a fit of bad temper. Strong words flung here and there. Hence the escape. Voyage through life and death. Unto these shores.
-II-
"All intellectual discussions there get bogged down to ethnic quarrels. Your community against mine. Can't lose the argument. Matter of pride. Finding ethnic allusions is every contrary argument. Generalised paranoia" How bad I felt saying these things. Feeling self-righteous. Who am I to criticise. Are we not considered as a model of multicultural harmony, paradise of the southern seas…maybe I am the rotten apple.
Slowly nodding head on the other side of the table. I am only feeding his prejudices. Make him feel priviledged, living in Europe. Civilisation nowhere else.
They want a discourse, a medical description of the island – its lifeblood, sugar, flowing through the arteries of the roads up to the harbour. A description of the state apparatus. How free are you? What is the condition of women there? The literacy rate? The growth rate? Unemployment rate? Income per capita in dollars ( purchasing power parity)?
But I have only images coming back. And I can't talk of images. How can I tell – the hill by the coast on that cloudy day. It was covered by dry yellow grass, and neglected sugar cane. A hare burst out of the field at our approach and sped out, running for its life, as if we were in hot pursuit behind it. We laughed at it. Down at the foot of the hill, a woman was putting clothes to dry on the branches of a bush, beside her small corrugated iron house. A narrow road passed at the front of the house, hugging the coastline, squeezed between the hill and the small pebbly beach. Afterwards was the grave morose sea, muddy brown at its earthtouching fringe, bottlegreen thereafter, deepthinking and sad like a greying man musing upon his life. One felt cold looking at the two fishermen standing up to their heels very far away in the lagoon, near the lacy line of the reef – the line of greying hair on the head of the man."
actually, the second part tells two paralell stories, one is that of the very rational life of meghna ( lecturer at uni of mauritius, brooding, frustrated and intellectual ) and a homeless guy whom she sometimes visits, and talks to in a very patronising tone. He is called sanjay and his life is full of fantastic visions. later on in october 2005 ah was grabbed by the collar by mah friend khal and summoned to write a second novel or else... ah just lifted out Sanjay from meghna's story and made him into a story of his own.
ah miss that lost first part. was not very long but pretty poignant. anyway.
maybe one day ah'll try mah hand again at writing meghna's story.
1 July 2009
A few quick notes, ‘bout the TV programmes I usually watch:
(i) Mickey Mouse Clubhouse: Daisy is smart and sexy, Donald is famously hot tempered, Minnie is caring and maternal. Mickey intrigues me. He is so extremely nice, if he were a person in real life he would be laughed at. He is the only character, out of these four, who strikes me as being only capable on living in a children’s cartoon world. In this way, he is a “real” cartoon character.
(ii) I am so addicted to Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends. I love everything in it, the graphics, the constraint imposed by the characters living in an orphan’s home ( modern cartoons often exploit fantasies of power by children – child heroes with supernatural powers. But I feel that children’s stories are made more poignant when the child hero has lost something ( a parent, most often) or is under a constraint ( living with bad foster parents) which only exacerbates the child hero’s will to live. Foster’s Home creates a magic atmosphere out of the wild variety of the imaginary friends, constrained by the rules imposed by Frankie and Mr Herriman. Blooh’s wild energy reminds me very much of the feeling of childhood, with the impossible bets and challenges between children.
(iii) When my wife watches Chinese cooking programmes I watch too, captivated by the extraordinary bonhomie of Chinese cooks. My favourite one was a small, toothy, hypertalkative Taiwanese cook until I stumbled on even better, a Beijing cook with an enormously thick Beijing accent ( corrrrrr, kuarrrrrrr, corrrrrrrrr it’s just a series of burrrrrrrrrs ) and his bumbling associate.
(iv) When will World War two ever stop ? I’ve counted two villains on Cartoon Network with German accents: Dr Duffenshmirz in Phineas and Ferb and Wasabi in Chop Chooky Socks. And there’s a sidekick in The Secret Saturdays with a squarish Germanic face and a monocle. We’re in 2009, 64 years after the end of WW2. Oh yes, Wasabi too has a monocle, if I do remember.
(v) Will History Channel please STOP showing programmes at midnight about Mayan prophecies that the world will end in 2012 ? I wanna go to bed in a good mood.
(vi) I LOVE Tea Leoni in TV series The Naked Truth. She’s gloomy, sexy, bored and has a repressed violence about her that I found appealing. What an underused actress. Her husband is such a jerk ( David Duchovny, that boring guy in that boring , over rated series X Files. That guy can’t even speak properly, he mumbles).
(vii) Why that trend for really spooky characters in children’s cartoons ? I find the atmosphere and the characters in Ben 10 really disturbing. Even the looks in the children’s eyes has something disquieting. The fights are pretty intensely violent. The Secret Saturdays is also rather spooky.
(viii) That guy Mr Big in Sex and the City, he’s a bit of a mirage for Carrie, isn’t he ? Ah mean, look at the subtext in the story, her obsession with New York, its beauty, its power, its glamorous men. Big has no name, but you have a feeling his full name is Big Apple, he’s the personification of what she loves about New York ( he is so “embededded” in the city, seems to have no other past or family) and yet he always remains aloof from her. “Like most big cities, he is ultimately unknowable” ( forgot her name – that famous transsexual writer, Jay something)
9 May 2009
I’m finishing a re read The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields and I find it just as darn good as when I first read it ‘bout 10 years ago. It’s the bloody wonderfully written story of the life of an ordinary Canadian/American woman with the image of stone laced throughout, as a sort of cosmic link to the larger universe, a counterpoise to her very domestic life. That larger picture, as well as the persistent allusions to the world of botany ( her husband is a botanist, she herself is an expert gardener) is like a large window through which one looks from time to time at the outside world throughout the book, while examining the inner life of Daisy, the main character. Stone, solid and ancient, lends its warm strength to the terrible frailty and loneliness of Daisy the orphan, the lone child of a poor quarryman. Yet stone is also sterile and after her marriage with the botanist Barker Flett, she tries to hide the squareness and austerity of her stone house by covering it with a large garden. Later on she experiences a rare rush of happiness when she travels to the Orkney islands with her grand aunt Victoria, looking for a lost relative while Victoria looks for traces of fossilized life in the stony cliffs of the Orkneys – the symbolism seems naïve or heavy when I put it that way, but it is always elegantly placed in the text by the writer.
Ms Shield’s style is deft, masterly and it avoids the traps of excessive psychological or emotional torment in which “women’s” or “domestic” prose can be prone to. Daisy’s sense of powerlessness, or of living an inauthentic, unexamined life bound by social or domestic duty is one which anyone, man or woman will feel powerfully empathy for. Her skill as a master writer is well seen in the chapter “Sorrow” in which different characters each give, in extremely well rendered voices, their explanation of why Daisy falls, some time at the age of 60, into a depression：the young feminist daughter Alice, all shrill from having just read Germaine Greer, the melodramatic Jewish businessman, the shifty editor in chief who had just fired Daisy from her job as columnist in the gardening section of the newspaper, the emotionally vague son Warren, the feisty independent Fraidy with her 1930’s music hall slang.
All in all a splendid book and one which I’d easily read again later. I’ve checked about Carol Shields on google – sadly, she died in 2003 at the age of 68. She was able to manage a prolific and successful career as a writer while raising five kids. Some people are actually born with two heads and four arms, I suspect, and they hide the extra limbs in daytime. Interestingly, her advice to young writers is pretty much what I remember every writer say on the subject: (i) try to write 500 words per day, every day on something of interest to you. In other words, practice, practice, practice (ii) read good books, no junk literature, no tv.
2 May 2009
Mr sewtohul masterfully refutes some common misconceptions held by vulgar minds. Also, a vindication of Malraux
I wonder why people always associate youth with fun and frivolity. When I read interviews of 20 year old pop stars, I expect like everyone else to have them talk about the fun they’ve had shopping in London or frolicking in the Riviera but all they speak about is of their career, their manager, their projects. Some time later we read about them having been admitted to a clinic, looking as gaunt as famine victims. Maybe they are an extreme example, but even ordinary youths are put to so many trials at that age: to have to choose the right course of study, the right university, pass assignments and exams. Of course, not everyone goes to university or even to high school but with the spread of education, it is becoming more and more common. The competition becomes even tighter, and parents’ expectations ever higher and higher. There are also the social expectations: to hang with the right crowd at the right places, to have the right girlfriend or boyfriend, to listen to the right music, wear the right clothes. I remember my teenage years as a period when there was such enormous pressure to blend in the crowd.
There is also the biological pressure: at that age, one takes things so seriously, as if we were the first human beings to ever know love or disappointment. One takes oneself so seriously – young people rarely laugh about themselves, that’s something you learn to do much later. Young people do things with enormous intensity.
So, who got the idea that youth is the time of fun and laughter ? The more I think of it, the more I believe it’s old age which is the time for taking things lightly. In a short story I read the other day, by Scott Mc Fitzgerald ( in the Norton anthology of American short stories), the hero goes to a wedding and there meets the bride’s mother. She thanks him, in a poised, serene voice, for having sent her flowers when she was sick “He realised that it all had the same value for her: her daughter’s wedding, the flowers she had received. She had married five of her children, and had seen two of the marriages collapse” （sorry if I remembered it wrong）Old age, hopefully, liberates us from many expectations. The worst of tortures must be to grow old with a broken, or bitter heart.
I guess it’s just a misunderstanding: we think that youth is the time of fun and games, because young people generally have fun in such a loud and obvious manner, so that we think that that’s what their life is about. We forget that they also spend most of their time working, studying or brooding in their rooms about what it all means, to the sound of The Doors, or whatever ( I know a guy who sincerely and candidly told me, at 16, that his favourite singer was Kishore Kumar. That was in 1988, not in 1958).
Another commonly held idea which I find rather odd is the notion that the artist is necessarily a rebel, an idealist, a pure soul who lives apart from the world. I guess it comes from Byron and before that from Rousseau. There is a long line of Byronic characters in the Western imagination – Byron himself, Rimbaud, Poe, the dada group, Hemingway, Jim Morrison. It is flattering for artists and gives them some licence to misbehave, but I wonder how much longer that idea will survive in the future. After all, it is a pretty recent idea, starting with the Romantics, and especially Byron who more or less invented, personified and popularized that idea. Before that, artists were considered as artisans, respected as masters of their craft but nothing more (“Something merrier next time, Master Shakespeare”). Great musicians would live in a prince’s court, but would dine together with the domestics, something which Haydn accepted but Mozart hated.
Actually, artists who are totally true to their art are few and between, for several reasons: fear of totally surrendering to the daemon’s hold, compromises with commercial needs and exigencies, simple impossibility of doing otherwise. For one Joyce, who lived in poverty writing Ulysses ( which I only half-like, actually, but maybe out of envy too) you have millions of people who use their literary talent to work as journalists, speechwriters, teachers, writers of paperback thrillers. The same goes for musicians, painters and the rest. People do not always treat their children well, so what do we expect them to do with a gift from the gods, of talent and sensitivity? I myself confess to a base craving, from time to time, to be a suit, working in the City. I envy their smugness, their masters of the universe attitude. I know it sounds so last year, with the financial crisis, but the suits will always be with us.
On a different note - I have been rereading some pages of Malraux’s Antimemoires “Car c’est en Inde que se sont le plus largement déployées les ailes nocturnes de l’humanité…” His telling of Vishnu’s famous trick on the sage Narada is simply gorgeous and draws tears to the eyes: “Fetch me water, for I am thirsty….arriving in the village, a young girl opens the door and throws her arms around his neck. His arrival had been awaited since forever…and thus he knows the feel of mud between his toes, in the rice field, the pink flame of the cow dung fires at nightfall, the release of sleep after a day’s backbreaking work… until one day comes the flood”.
Some people always think of Malraux as pompous, the writer who became a minister out of love of “la gloriole”, the guy who did everything – going to fight in the Spanish civil war, or on explorations of the Arabian desert and of Central Asia – just to stay in the limelight. I find him brave, humble and actually fun loving. When he starts writing the Antimemoires, he has been sent to China by de Gaulle to get over his suicidal tendencies, made particularly bad by his son’s death in car accident. True, sometimes the Antimemoires can be unbearably stuffy and gloomy ( that obsession with death) and it is weird to see Stalin, Nehru and Mao all brooding and speaking like Malraux. But why does nobody think that Malraux did all the things he did, all the exploring and warring and politicking simply because he wanted to have fun, and be away from his gloomy obsessions ? He was a restless, virile kind of guy, who liked to be where the action was. We always think of virile men as being physically strong and heavily built – a laughable and absurd notion.
I feel so lucky that I picked up the Antimemoires when I was 17, it gave me such a wide picture of the world, away from the self righteous preaching by creepy shits like Sartre, whom I find genuinely nihilistic and soul destroying.
1 May 2009
Just a few hurried lines ( I am drowning in work since the past few months and there is no end in sight to it), after a short trip in Cairo, to say how much I found it pretty much like Delhi: the crazy driving, the men’s staring ( if not more) at foreign women, the Islamic architecture, the big and decrepit train station, the haggling over prices. I felt like I was back in India in 1998. Back then that had been my first trip out of Mauritius, at the ripe old age of 27. I had despaired of ever going abroad one day.
Our visit to the Pyramids, on the afternoon of the second day, took place after lunch in a KFC and was followed by a stroll in a posh downtown area in the evening. This gave a solid feeling of irreality to the experience. Upon arriving by subway in the suburb of Giza, we took a taxi who brought us deep in a poor neighbourhood, and stopped at a stable of horses and camels deep . A wall ran behind the stable and the owner of the place assured us that he was the “government tourist office” and that we absolutely had to hire one of his animals to reach the pyramids coz “there are no roads to there”. We had fallen in a major tourist trap but we had no choice but to give in, as we were worried about the access being closed, as it was already late in the day. So we were soon riding on a horse and a camel up a steep desert track towards the pyramids, which were on a desert plateau just at the end of the neighbourhood.
As soon as we were a bit out of town, we were wrapped in that eerie silence of the desert. The sky was very blue, a late afternoon blue and the pyramids, which were just a few dunes away, looked extremely remote and, well, mysterious.
The strangeness of the experience lay in the speed with which, suddenly, we were out of the busy town, riding in the desert towards, of all things in the world, the pyramids, the most out-of-the-way, utterly mysterious monuments in the world, and then one hour later, we were back in the town with its dusty suburbs, and its posh downtown hotels ( night saw us entering the Intercontinental, trying to look like rich tourists, so as to visit its toilet, and afterwards we had dinner in a Pizza hut). It was as if, on the way from work in downtown New York to his home in New Jersey, someone had left the highway to drop by on the ruins of Atlantis, half emerging from the sea just over the cliffs.
I could not help but think that it was like a sort of metaphor about the mind, or the ego: Cairo, with its statues of important men, its national museums and theaters, its shopping streets roaring with people at night, its bazaars and military academies – all life, bustle, hurry and worry of money and self importance. And just at the fingertip of one of its grubbier suburbs, the outlandish pyramids, frozen , or rather baked, in the eternal sands. Not to mention the even more freakishly strange Sphinx. All yellow, brown and orange below, and the shining blue sky above. The massive pyramids, the treacherous, shifting sands, and the ethereal sky. The odd feeling one gets, when looking at them, that they look more like the concluding statement of a civilization than its first effort ( let’s not get into conspiracy theories or pseudo history, though).
Monday, April 06, 2009
The other day I was thinking again of what I had written about the difficulty of judging people. I had asked : how do you judge rulers, given that the scope of their actions is so vast, that their effects are so complex, and can entail misery for some and benefit for others. Then I realized something, one of these things that are so obvious that you wonder how come you didn’t realize it a long time ago：there is an evil beauty about being part of the elite, something with a taint of the demoniac or the sadistic, in the sense that when you are of the ruling class, it is the others who bear the brunt of your actions. Of course you are also affected, but not that much. You are like the great ironclad battleships, it takes a lot of torpedoes to sink you. Actually, come to think of it, when you are of the ruling class, you can so easily do damage to others, even by the most innocent or well-meaning of your actions. Scott mc Fitzgerald also felt that, in the Great Gatsby, when he said of that rich couple (I think the girl’s name was Daisy) : “they were tiring people, Daisy and…, they messed up others’ lives, then they retreated into their money”.
Speaking of Scott McFitzgerald, I don’t know much about the subject, but I have a feeling that in his days, people had a powerful feeling that the rich were a race apart, an attractive and dangerous people. I’m thinking of “Gatsby”, and of “The adventures of Augie March” by Saul Bellow, and “the talented Mr Ripley” by Patricia Highsmith.
Nowadays, the truly rich are more discreet. Or rather, people spend much more time reading about pop stars, actors and sportsmen when they want to dream of glamour. That group is an odd species, most of them are from the middle class/ working class, and behave that way. Think of Victoria Beckham, who so actively behaved like a nouveau riche, even when she wasn’t yet there. By doing that, she actually emphasized so strongly her middle classness. So, pop stars, actors and sportsmen are ambiguous creatures, in that they can be awesomely rich yet they never try to behave like aristocrats, on the contrary they seem to work hard to retain something of the common touch. Those who try to do otherwise risk a fall from popular favour. Think, for example, of Nicole Kidman who by some trick of nature, or twist of character, always looks a pretty aloof person, and seems so very disliked because of that.
Up to probably around 1940, someone like Ms Kidman would probably have been idolised precisely because of that something glacial about her personality. People then were still addicted to the sexy unreachableness of aristocrats, their distant manners and exotic codes of behaviour, and the danger of trying to rub shoulders with them, when they could so easily play with you and leave you pregnant, heartbroken or humiliated.
Ours is an age of middle class comfort and fuzziness, nowadays the rich about whom we care and fantasize about must feel like people whom we believe that if we actually met them somewhere, say in a bar, we’d just strike a conversation with them and could even marry them, and our life would afterwards be a sort of enlarged version of being middle class, just having a bigger house and more jewelry but still somehow remaining within the same norms of behaviour.
However, the financial crisis is probably changing our view of the rich, in the sense that it has rudely woken us from our comfortable fantasies about actors and singers, and made us realize that all along, there was another class of rich people, the real rich people, the bankers and financiers who don’t do harmless movies, but do real business moves which have enormous impacts on our lives. All of a sudden, we are realizing, like our peasant ancestors did for thousands of years before us, that our lives are hostage to the fantasies and follies of the powerful. If your king wanted to invade the neighbouring kingdom, that meant your village would have to suffer the horrors of war. Many a thing had remained the same, but we were lulled into a feeling of comfort.
Posted by upunge at 6:23 AM 0 comments
1 march 2010
l'immortel
Il etait ne il y a longtemps, dans un village de samarie. De temperament reveur, il suivit les pas de l'homme qu’ils appelaient Christ, et qui disait etre le Messie. Apres la sanglante fin de cette aventure, il se retira dans les montagnes de Syrie, et ecrivit,au fil des annees diverses versions de qu’avait dit et fait l’homme nommé Jesus. Comme il n’était qu’un hermite inconnu de tous, les gens attribuerent ses récits aux apotres, Jean , Matthieu, Luc et Marc. Lui même se souciait peu de cela, car il etait trouble par les differences qui etaient apparues a chaque fois qu’il avait redige ce qu’il appelait les chroniques du Christ. D’où venait, par exemple, l’épisode de la Samaritaine parlant au Christ, pres d’un puit ? Et celui du Christ et des enfants ? Avait-il vraiment eu lieu ? Pourtant ces images etaient là, flottant dans sa memoire – il se souvenait du roucoulement des colombes, ce matin où les pharisiens avaient apporté la femme adultère devant le Christ, qui dessinait dans le sable avec son orteil.
Plongé dans ses meditations, il ne sentit pas passer les années. Un jour, cependant, après bien des siècles, il descendit des montagnes et se rendit compte que tout avait change, les villes prospères n’étaient plus que des ruines, et d’autres avaient surgi à leur place , et les enseignements du Christ s’étaient gonflés en un culte où prospéraient, une nouvelle fois, les pretres et les rois. Comme autrefois. Décu, il se fit marchand, et partit vers les oasis brulantes d’Arabie.
Là bas,longtemps après, il rencontra un home qui se disait être le dernier des prophètes de Dieu. Il se dit que cette fois ci peut être, le monde pourrait devenir meilleur, et il devint un des compagnons du prophète. Après sa mort, il devint le calife, vivant simplement, comme l’avait fait le prophète, alors que les armées de la nouvelle religion atteignaient les frontières de la Chine lointaine, aux confins du monde.
Puis un matin, un roucoulement de colombes lui rappela ce matin, où le Christ avait jugé la femme adultère, et il se rappela aussi la fraicheur de sa cave, en Syrie.
Tout fut arrange très vite, on enterra un autre, vraiment mort celui là, tandis qu’il partit vers l’Orient, traversant le Rub al Khali pour atteindre les cotes d’Oman. Là, il se promena longtemps sur les quais émerveillé par le grincement des mats des boutres,.
Il apprit par des voyageurs la mort de Hassan et de Hussein, à la bataille de Kerbala, et comprit alors que rien ne changerait, les religions deviendraient toujours des affaires de pretres et de rois, pas de Dieu.
Alors il resolut de prendre la route des mers, ayant remarqué que les navires ne laissaient pas de traces derrière eux, tout comme lui aussi souhaitait se dissoudre, ayant tant vécu.
Une tempete se leva, et la boutre, partie longer les cotes d’Azanie, là où vivent les hommes noirs, ne fut bientot qu’une epave flottante, dans laquelles les hommes moururent tous – sauf lui. Il connut alors la plate horreur de la mer calme, dans laquelle il brulait sous le sel et l’eclat implacable du soleil, jusqu’a ce qu’apres plusieurs jours, il apercut les cotes de cette ile, que les marins nommaient Dina Mashriq, l’ile de l’Ouest.
La, il se plongea de nouveau dans ses meditations, qui devinrent de plus en plus morcelées,a mesure que passaient les siecles, de sorte que sa pensee prit la forme des vagues qui s’ecrasaient doucement contre le sable du lagon, ou celle des nuages en haut des mornes.
Un jour, cependant, les hommes arriverent sur l’ile, apportant avec eux leurs horreurs – d’autres hommes en chaine, la cupidité, leur rage de tout abattre, et de tout tuer . Il se refugia dans les forêts, effrayé.
Mais au fil des siècles, les hommes avancaient dans l’ile, et lui meme, n’ayant guère entendu de voix
humaine pendant tout ce temps , chercha a retrouver le reconfort des foules.
Il eut beaucoup d’enfants – la plupart des habitants de l’ile etaient ses descendants, sans le savoir.
Un jour, il se fit poete, et ecrivit un livre appelé “La Parole Testament”. Une vendeuse dans une librairie lui dit alors par erreur “ Oui monsieur, nous avons bien votre livre, le Nouveau Testament”
Et alors, il se rappela.
(avec toutes mes excuses a Borges, pour ce mauvais pastiche de son immortelle nouvelle, "les immortels")
note: the above was inspired by something which happened to my friend umar timol. he called a library to ask if they were distributing his new book "la parole testament". the salesgirl replied: "yes sir, we do have on our shelves your book Le Nouveau Testament"
27 february 2010
the idea of childhood
I'm wondering whether the people from before the victorians didn't maybe have some point in considering children as miniature adults. it's with the victorians, and their strong middle class family outlook, that we've discovered the world of childhood. maybe the roots of that came also from rousseau, blake and wordsworth. ah mean, at around the time of rousseau, the portraits of the nobility start to change, and instead of being portrayed alone, nobles are painted as a family. that was a novelty, because before that the rearing of children was left to maids, but during the 18th century, nobles started to project themselves as loving parents. maybe it was the influence of rousseau, ah dunno. afterwards we have blake writing "songs of innocence" ( but blake was considered a weirdo until the late 20th century, so maybe he wasn't influential), and wordsworth writing "the child is the father of man". with victorian society, middle class family life gradually became the standard reference, and people even start judging other styles of family life from the point of view of middle class morality. for example, when we look at "dallas" , we are watching all the adultery and tricks of upper class people, as something both sordid and entertaining, from our middle class perspective ( something which people even from the 1950's would have found profoundly strange, coz up to then you looked up at the upper class with an idea of imitating their elegance, their mannerisms, not to judge their family life). with that rise of the middle class family as the model, we also see the rise of the idea of the child as someone living in his own world, and with his own worldview. that's how we have the rise of children's books, like enid blyton, beatrix potter etc.
of course, children do need a literature adapted to their psychological and emotional development, they can't read violent or boring stuff, but when i look at some of the stuff in children's books i take at the library, i find it excessively cute and gentle. i wonder whether we don't exaggerate this idea of children being pure and fragile. children do have an innocence and there are some things which they are not supposed to know until they are teens, but in general i think this idea of kids having specific needs has become a bit of an industry.
got to go.
18 january 2010
About politics and story telling
These are some thoughts about politics and story telling. I’m sorry if the language is a bit rudimentary – I don’t have much time to polish it.
The links between politics and story telling are complex. All politics are to a certain degree, story telling: a politician defines himself by his “life story” which has to include some accomplishments. A government will tell you a “grand story” of its accomplishments. Nationalists have a grand narrative of their country’s glorious past. A writer or a film maker on the other hand will tell their own story, and that story will subvert the grand narratives of politics and religion to the extent that the writer/film maker’s story does not fit in these social narratives.
A writer/film maker can be self consciously ideological, and write stories which are overtly ideological and even didactic, or the ideology can be completely unconscious, to the extent that the writer isn’t really aware that he is making a political point.
Let us see two very different genres, in their “political coefficient”
An apolitical genre ? the Western
Westerns take place in the “naked” world of the Wild West of the 1860’s. This is a world of deserts and new towns, in which politics is at its most rudimentary: law and order is ensured by the sherif, more or less based on his personal judgment. The appeal of the Western lies precisely in this feeling that it takes place in a world of every man to himself. There is a recurring moment in westerns, which is maybe its defining moment: early in the movie, the hero comes in the saloon and for some reason, he is surrounded by the bad guy and his acolytes. They close around him, with their finger on the trigger. Then something happens- the sherif comes in, or the hero fires a single shot. But the feeling of physical danger, of raw intimidation which has been created pervades the rest of the movie.
In westerns, outsiders from the more civilised East coast or from Europe are usually shown as effeminate and cowardly. In Vera Cruz, the Austrian officer accompanying the treasure of the Emperor of Mexico is depicted as a pompous buffoon. This opposition between the wild west and the civilised East coast is dramatically depicted in “The man who killed Liberty Valance” with the rivalry between the lawyer (James Stewart ?) and the cowboy (John Wayne). The lawyer wins, as civilisation must do, but he is aggrieved by the defeat of the cowboy.
Curiously, many Westerns strike me as quasi spiritual movies, in the almost zen nakedness of their world view. The unnamed, laconic cowboy played by Clint Eastwood in Sergio Leone’s westerns is like a cousin of some wandering samurai in a japanese sword story: apolitical and lonely.
We usually associate westerns with conservative values: strongly traditional depiction of masculinity, negative depiction of American Indians. But westerns such as “The man who killed Liberty Valance” or “The good, the bad and the ugly” seem to me to be pretty apolitical. I think their charm comes precisely from their ideal of the cowboy as an embodiment of “pure” manhood, removed from the taints of politics and money, living from his gun and his lasso, in the desert.
A hyper political genre: science fiction
It is curious that science fiction should be such a densely political genre. One would think that the décor of outer space, with its remote stars and planets, would be far removed from the world of politics. Yet science fiction, maybe more than any other genre, brims with politics, overt and covert. The wild possibilities of outer space and futuristic machines are fertile ground for all kinds of political messages, as well as sexual and racial fantasies which come straight from racial and sexual politics.
It did not start that way. Jules Verne’s stories usually centered around an interesting machine – a submarine, a rocket – which would carry the heroes through wondrous adventures. However, soon came HG Wells’ “War of the Worlds”. Wells was a socialist, and the war of the worlds is a biting satire of colonialism, with its depiction of the ruthless extermination of our species by a more advanced alien race.
After HG Wells, the trend was set: science fiction has been the great political genre of the 20th century, abounding with cautionary tales about the dangers of unchecked scientific advance, or throwing back to us twisted sexual and racial fantasies which echo the sexual and racial politics of the century.
The cautionary tales are so many, and so famous, that I only need to mention a few: Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, Terminator ( about artificial intelligence), Gataca (about genetic manipulation).
The sexual and racial fantasies are less well known, and quite interesting. On race, there is the fascinating “mirror effect” between American and Japanese science fiction. In “Buck Rogers”, an American science fiction series of the 30’s , the US has been colonised by the hordes of a future Chinese empire, and only a free area, covering New England is free from the rule of the cruel and devious Chinese emperors. If you think the racial stereotypes are crude, then consider the view from the Asian side: in the Japanese animes I watched as a child, the world would be invaded by a race of ugly giant aliens who would throw atomic bombs on human cities, but humanity was defended by a giant robot (Goldorak) who wielded high tech weapons looking very much like traditional samurai weaponry. The defining moment in Japanese anime of those days was: the hero ( frail, long haired, androgynous) is pummelled by a huge, muscular baddy with a squarish face like a caricature of a white man. Finally the hero is thrown against a wall, crashes in it, blood spurts from his forehead and draws on his bandana the emblem of the Japanese Imperial Navy, his eyes go afire, he screams “Banzaiiiiiiiiiii” and bounds back to battle with his last breath.
Apart from the war of the races, science fiction has also been the battleground of the war of the sexes, and the most disturbing example of this is the “Alien” series. The first “Alien” came out in 1979, during the heyday of the feminist movement. Alien is not really a political movie as much as it is a powerful, bizzare metaphor on sexuality: the creature’s huge head is like a monstrous erect penis, its mode of reproduction ( fertilisation of human bodies, followed by a brutal, horrible bursting through the belly of the carrier) is a caricature of human reproduction. There is a powerfully sexual and nightmarish tension throughout the movie, as the creature hunts the girl (Ripley ?) throughout the space station.
Throughout the Alien series, there are scenes of the creature approaching Ripley while she is in bed (these long, flower like beds of the movie, with the room always lighted in a virginal white) or under a shower. And there are innumerable scenes of fertilisation, of bodies trapped in gluey matter, near pods which are going to bloom. Throughout this apocalyptic landscape of sex, there strides the valiant female warrior Ripley, muscular, heavily armed, virginal – yet in the later series, the creature does get to impregnate her ( but she throws herself in liquid metal, to destroy his offspring).
An obsession with politics: mauritian literature
The notion of mauritian literature is intimately associated, in the minds of many, with the left wing movements of the 70’s. “Mauricianisme” was a left wing movement, and the writers of those days wrote heavily political texts such as “Li”.
Maybe because of this hangover, whenever journalists interview writers in Mauritius, they would always ask question such as: “What is your book about ?” or “What were trying to say”. It is always assumed that a Mauritian writer is trying to deliver a message, when he writes a novel or a drama.
For a long time, I had trouble explaining to people that I was just telling a story when I wrote a novel, that my aim was a poetics, not an ideology. However, lately, there has been another trend: people would ask me “what’s is about, your story” but in such a light hearted way that I feel that they are just asking me some idea about the plot, but just to have an idea whether it sounds entertaining or not. This is the new generation, who think of culture only as some kind of light entertainment. They have grown up in a world full of entertaining movies and games, and are a bit light headed about culture. Suddenly, I find myself missing the days when writers were automatically considered as ponderous left wing intellectuals who wrote political tracts.
(to be continued, if I get more ideas)
16 december 2009
help for my new cult
I'm working hard to start up a carey lowell cult. but i'm facing theological difficulties. this particular cult revolves not specifically on the "normal" carey (former james bond girl,wife of richard gere, lives in the hamptons, practices tibetan buddhism) but on her alter ego jamie ross, assistant district attorney in " Law and order" (96-98 seasons), the ultimate tough, glacial, smart dominatrix. so, which metaphysical link shall we decrete to exist between carey and her acting persona ? two-in-one ( catholicism) ? two separate (arianism) ? to proceed from one to the other by initiatic steps (gnosticism) ? one is the manifestation of the other's latent powers (tibetan buddhism) ? one is the lila played by the other (vaishnavism) ? can someone help me on that one ? if you do, i'll appoint you as high priest of my cult (i'm it's pope).
15 august 2009
gardens
Yesterday Jay said: "I don't like Africa" "Why ?" "It's kind of old...." and he added "I'd like to go to another country where I've never been before". I'd like to get out of Addis Ababa too for some time.
Thank God we have a garden, it's our miniature countryside. I'm interested in gardens. Each civilisation had its style of garden; the arabs, with their rows of oranges and jasmine, and numerous fountains ( the arabs adored fountains, the freshness, the wetness, the gurgling of water appealed to them), the Chinese with their rockeries and zig zagging paths ( unfortunately I haven't had the chance to see the more beautiful Chinese gardens like the Garden of the Master of Nets, in Suzhou), the Persians, about whom I've heard that they have grassless gardens. We do not know what the gardens of ancient India were like, coz they've been replaced by Moghul style gardens, but they probably favoured clumps of trees in which to catch shade. In many cultures gardens are the cross roads between the physical and supernatural worlds.The word paradise comes from the Persian word for "grove". There is the Garden of Eden, a supernatural place in which a human drama of temptation unfolds. In Indian mythology, gardens are the place where nymphs seduce sages and kings, and where Krishna and Radha play. In Chinese literature, snake and fox women seduce heroes in gardens. Generally speaking, the forest is a place of raw danger, haunted by demons, and the palace is the world of intrigue. The garden is an intermediary place, of eroticism and surprise. Kings love to play at being shepherds , hence the pastoral amusement, beloved of marie antoinette. interestingly, some people claim to have seen the ghost of marie antoinette in remote parts of the trianon gardens, still disguised as a shepherdess. a garden is a make believe world, in which we play with a tamed nature and pretend to love "natural things" ( we do not, really - very few of us could cope with real nature, the jungle or the steppe). Gardens are ambivalent ( I like Clint Eastwood's film "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil"), places in which evil spirits can trick one ( or in which nowadays, junkies lurk) and also places of hidden love ( lovers flee to gardens, away from peeping eyes), yet theirs is a mild ambivalence. tragedies often take place in palaces, whereas the garden is the place of comedy. In gardens, we can play at bit at being God, by redoing the world the way we like it. Gardens, more than palaces, show us the milder and more endearing side of humanity.
7 august 2009
Similarities between chinese and indian mythology
1, Ne zha the child god is mischievous like Krishna. Krishna kills the demon snake living in the river, and Ne Zha kills the dragon king living in the sea. Ne zha was born during the reign of an evil king of the Shang dynasty, who tries to kill him. Krishna was born during the reign of the evil Kamsa.
2. Sun Wu Kong and Hanuman. Resemblance is obvious. Both monkey kings have enormous strength and can change size. Sun Wu kong is the disciple of Xuan Zang, Hanuman is the disciple of Rama. Both are bachelors. In his childhood, Hanuman swallowed the sun. In his youth, Sun went to war against the kingdom of heaven. Both became very wise in their old age.
3. The three Pandavas in mahabharata and the three sworn brothers in the three kingdoms. Yuddhishtira is like Liu Bei, wise and humane. However Liu Bei is a little bit cunning and sometimes pretends to be not interested in power. Arjuna is very much like Guan Gong. Both have superhuman skill with weapons, both are proud and hot blooded. Bhima is like the third brother ( forgot his name). Both have enormous strength and crude appetites ( very fond of food and wine). The pandavas are helped by Krishna, who sometimes uses supernatural powers. The three sworn brothers are helped by Zhu ge liang, who is both immensely wise and a bit of a magician.
11 July 2009
Conversations
giving ambitions to my kid
Jay has built a big lego airplane. Me: "That's a big airplane" Jay: "It's not an airplane, it's a scholarship" (after some minutes) Jay: "What's a scholarship ?" Me: "It's a very nice kind of ship. I hope you get into one, one day"
resourceful government
Yesterday, at the reception at US embassy. American diplomat "So, when is your wife getting the baby ?" Me: "Er, maybe it could be now. Do you have a free room ?" American diplomat: "Ahem, I'm afraid our doctor is not on duty" Me, to Serbian friend : "If she's born here, she gets the green card, right ?" Serbian friend "Well in 1942 the king of Yugoslavia was in exile in the US, and his wife was about to deliver her baby. However according to the Yugoslav constitution, the king had to be born in Yugoslavia. So the US president declared the hotel room in which the baby was being born as Yugoslav territory, for a few hours. So they might do the opposite" I thought of the American ambassador phoning to Obama to have him declare the room at the US embassy in which Sujata was being born, as Mauritian territory, and decided I didn't want to bother everyone like that.
5 July 2009
Below is an extract from a beautiful, impossibly difficult and complicated, unfinished story whose first part i lost long time a ago, let's call it "the meghna cycle" the main character was a girl ( later a prudish young woman) called meghna. who said ah can't do feminine writing, uh , uh , uh ? It's the beginning of the second part.the first part took place in her adolescence. ah read it to umar and azaghen long time ago at zorro's, in vacoas. this is the beginning of the second part, when meghna's in england.
" I was a nomad of the soul, always travelling from imaginary homeland to imaginary homeland. Wandering away from the silvery dew-kissed underwood of nostalgia, in the little hours of the morning, I would reach dreary flat badlands in those sad winter evenings in London. There is no water here, only the sound of water.
Wandering. There was nowhere to go back to. Nowhere worth mentioning. The bogged ship of motherland, stranded in the sandy shallows amidst the fog, was slowly rotting far away in the corners of my mind. A flying dutchman, manned by bogey crew, skips over the waves at night, flying the jolly roger once more. Here I am, a country pasted together, mummy of recollections, and fantasies.
Exile, brief, willed by a fit of bad temper. Strong words flung here and there. Hence the escape. Voyage through life and death. Unto these shores.
-II-
"All intellectual discussions there get bogged down to ethnic quarrels. Your community against mine. Can't lose the argument. Matter of pride. Finding ethnic allusions is every contrary argument. Generalised paranoia" How bad I felt saying these things. Feeling self-righteous. Who am I to criticise. Are we not considered as a model of multicultural harmony, paradise of the southern seas…maybe I am the rotten apple.
Slowly nodding head on the other side of the table. I am only feeding his prejudices. Make him feel priviledged, living in Europe. Civilisation nowhere else.
They want a discourse, a medical description of the island – its lifeblood, sugar, flowing through the arteries of the roads up to the harbour. A description of the state apparatus. How free are you? What is the condition of women there? The literacy rate? The growth rate? Unemployment rate? Income per capita in dollars ( purchasing power parity)?
But I have only images coming back. And I can't talk of images. How can I tell – the hill by the coast on that cloudy day. It was covered by dry yellow grass, and neglected sugar cane. A hare burst out of the field at our approach and sped out, running for its life, as if we were in hot pursuit behind it. We laughed at it. Down at the foot of the hill, a woman was putting clothes to dry on the branches of a bush, beside her small corrugated iron house. A narrow road passed at the front of the house, hugging the coastline, squeezed between the hill and the small pebbly beach. Afterwards was the grave morose sea, muddy brown at its earthtouching fringe, bottlegreen thereafter, deepthinking and sad like a greying man musing upon his life. One felt cold looking at the two fishermen standing up to their heels very far away in the lagoon, near the lacy line of the reef – the line of greying hair on the head of the man."
actually, the second part tells two paralell stories, one is that of the very rational life of meghna ( lecturer at uni of mauritius, brooding, frustrated and intellectual ) and a homeless guy whom she sometimes visits, and talks to in a very patronising tone. He is called sanjay and his life is full of fantastic visions. later on in october 2005 ah was grabbed by the collar by mah friend khal and summoned to write a second novel or else... ah just lifted out Sanjay from meghna's story and made him into a story of his own.
ah miss that lost first part. was not very long but pretty poignant. anyway.
maybe one day ah'll try mah hand again at writing meghna's story.
1 July 2009
A few quick notes, ‘bout the TV programmes I usually watch:
(i) Mickey Mouse Clubhouse: Daisy is smart and sexy, Donald is famously hot tempered, Minnie is caring and maternal. Mickey intrigues me. He is so extremely nice, if he were a person in real life he would be laughed at. He is the only character, out of these four, who strikes me as being only capable on living in a children’s cartoon world. In this way, he is a “real” cartoon character.
(ii) I am so addicted to Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends. I love everything in it, the graphics, the constraint imposed by the characters living in an orphan’s home ( modern cartoons often exploit fantasies of power by children – child heroes with supernatural powers. But I feel that children’s stories are made more poignant when the child hero has lost something ( a parent, most often) or is under a constraint ( living with bad foster parents) which only exacerbates the child hero’s will to live. Foster’s Home creates a magic atmosphere out of the wild variety of the imaginary friends, constrained by the rules imposed by Frankie and Mr Herriman. Blooh’s wild energy reminds me very much of the feeling of childhood, with the impossible bets and challenges between children.
(iii) When my wife watches Chinese cooking programmes I watch too, captivated by the extraordinary bonhomie of Chinese cooks. My favourite one was a small, toothy, hypertalkative Taiwanese cook until I stumbled on even better, a Beijing cook with an enormously thick Beijing accent ( corrrrrr, kuarrrrrrr, corrrrrrrrr it’s just a series of burrrrrrrrrs ) and his bumbling associate.
(iv) When will World War two ever stop ? I’ve counted two villains on Cartoon Network with German accents: Dr Duffenshmirz in Phineas and Ferb and Wasabi in Chop Chooky Socks. And there’s a sidekick in The Secret Saturdays with a squarish Germanic face and a monocle. We’re in 2009, 64 years after the end of WW2. Oh yes, Wasabi too has a monocle, if I do remember.
(v) Will History Channel please STOP showing programmes at midnight about Mayan prophecies that the world will end in 2012 ? I wanna go to bed in a good mood.
(vi) I LOVE Tea Leoni in TV series The Naked Truth. She’s gloomy, sexy, bored and has a repressed violence about her that I found appealing. What an underused actress. Her husband is such a jerk ( David Duchovny, that boring guy in that boring , over rated series X Files. That guy can’t even speak properly, he mumbles).
(vii) Why that trend for really spooky characters in children’s cartoons ? I find the atmosphere and the characters in Ben 10 really disturbing. Even the looks in the children’s eyes has something disquieting. The fights are pretty intensely violent. The Secret Saturdays is also rather spooky.
(viii) That guy Mr Big in Sex and the City, he’s a bit of a mirage for Carrie, isn’t he ? Ah mean, look at the subtext in the story, her obsession with New York, its beauty, its power, its glamorous men. Big has no name, but you have a feeling his full name is Big Apple, he’s the personification of what she loves about New York ( he is so “embededded” in the city, seems to have no other past or family) and yet he always remains aloof from her. “Like most big cities, he is ultimately unknowable” ( forgot her name – that famous transsexual writer, Jay something)
9 May 2009
I’m finishing a re read The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields and I find it just as darn good as when I first read it ‘bout 10 years ago. It’s the bloody wonderfully written story of the life of an ordinary Canadian/American woman with the image of stone laced throughout, as a sort of cosmic link to the larger universe, a counterpoise to her very domestic life. That larger picture, as well as the persistent allusions to the world of botany ( her husband is a botanist, she herself is an expert gardener) is like a large window through which one looks from time to time at the outside world throughout the book, while examining the inner life of Daisy, the main character. Stone, solid and ancient, lends its warm strength to the terrible frailty and loneliness of Daisy the orphan, the lone child of a poor quarryman. Yet stone is also sterile and after her marriage with the botanist Barker Flett, she tries to hide the squareness and austerity of her stone house by covering it with a large garden. Later on she experiences a rare rush of happiness when she travels to the Orkney islands with her grand aunt Victoria, looking for a lost relative while Victoria looks for traces of fossilized life in the stony cliffs of the Orkneys – the symbolism seems naïve or heavy when I put it that way, but it is always elegantly placed in the text by the writer.
Ms Shield’s style is deft, masterly and it avoids the traps of excessive psychological or emotional torment in which “women’s” or “domestic” prose can be prone to. Daisy’s sense of powerlessness, or of living an inauthentic, unexamined life bound by social or domestic duty is one which anyone, man or woman will feel powerfully empathy for. Her skill as a master writer is well seen in the chapter “Sorrow” in which different characters each give, in extremely well rendered voices, their explanation of why Daisy falls, some time at the age of 60, into a depression：the young feminist daughter Alice, all shrill from having just read Germaine Greer, the melodramatic Jewish businessman, the shifty editor in chief who had just fired Daisy from her job as columnist in the gardening section of the newspaper, the emotionally vague son Warren, the feisty independent Fraidy with her 1930’s music hall slang.
All in all a splendid book and one which I’d easily read again later. I’ve checked about Carol Shields on google – sadly, she died in 2003 at the age of 68. She was able to manage a prolific and successful career as a writer while raising five kids. Some people are actually born with two heads and four arms, I suspect, and they hide the extra limbs in daytime. Interestingly, her advice to young writers is pretty much what I remember every writer say on the subject: (i) try to write 500 words per day, every day on something of interest to you. In other words, practice, practice, practice (ii) read good books, no junk literature, no tv.
2 May 2009
Mr sewtohul masterfully refutes some common misconceptions held by vulgar minds. Also, a vindication of Malraux
I wonder why people always associate youth with fun and frivolity. When I read interviews of 20 year old pop stars, I expect like everyone else to have them talk about the fun they’ve had shopping in London or frolicking in the Riviera but all they speak about is of their career, their manager, their projects. Some time later we read about them having been admitted to a clinic, looking as gaunt as famine victims. Maybe they are an extreme example, but even ordinary youths are put to so many trials at that age: to have to choose the right course of study, the right university, pass assignments and exams. Of course, not everyone goes to university or even to high school but with the spread of education, it is becoming more and more common. The competition becomes even tighter, and parents’ expectations ever higher and higher. There are also the social expectations: to hang with the right crowd at the right places, to have the right girlfriend or boyfriend, to listen to the right music, wear the right clothes. I remember my teenage years as a period when there was such enormous pressure to blend in the crowd.
There is also the biological pressure: at that age, one takes things so seriously, as if we were the first human beings to ever know love or disappointment. One takes oneself so seriously – young people rarely laugh about themselves, that’s something you learn to do much later. Young people do things with enormous intensity.
So, who got the idea that youth is the time of fun and laughter ? The more I think of it, the more I believe it’s old age which is the time for taking things lightly. In a short story I read the other day, by Scott Mc Fitzgerald ( in the Norton anthology of American short stories), the hero goes to a wedding and there meets the bride’s mother. She thanks him, in a poised, serene voice, for having sent her flowers when she was sick “He realised that it all had the same value for her: her daughter’s wedding, the flowers she had received. She had married five of her children, and had seen two of the marriages collapse” （sorry if I remembered it wrong）Old age, hopefully, liberates us from many expectations. The worst of tortures must be to grow old with a broken, or bitter heart.
I guess it’s just a misunderstanding: we think that youth is the time of fun and games, because young people generally have fun in such a loud and obvious manner, so that we think that that’s what their life is about. We forget that they also spend most of their time working, studying or brooding in their rooms about what it all means, to the sound of The Doors, or whatever ( I know a guy who sincerely and candidly told me, at 16, that his favourite singer was Kishore Kumar. That was in 1988, not in 1958).
Another commonly held idea which I find rather odd is the notion that the artist is necessarily a rebel, an idealist, a pure soul who lives apart from the world. I guess it comes from Byron and before that from Rousseau. There is a long line of Byronic characters in the Western imagination – Byron himself, Rimbaud, Poe, the dada group, Hemingway, Jim Morrison. It is flattering for artists and gives them some licence to misbehave, but I wonder how much longer that idea will survive in the future. After all, it is a pretty recent idea, starting with the Romantics, and especially Byron who more or less invented, personified and popularized that idea. Before that, artists were considered as artisans, respected as masters of their craft but nothing more (“Something merrier next time, Master Shakespeare”). Great musicians would live in a prince’s court, but would dine together with the domestics, something which Haydn accepted but Mozart hated.
Actually, artists who are totally true to their art are few and between, for several reasons: fear of totally surrendering to the daemon’s hold, compromises with commercial needs and exigencies, simple impossibility of doing otherwise. For one Joyce, who lived in poverty writing Ulysses ( which I only half-like, actually, but maybe out of envy too) you have millions of people who use their literary talent to work as journalists, speechwriters, teachers, writers of paperback thrillers. The same goes for musicians, painters and the rest. People do not always treat their children well, so what do we expect them to do with a gift from the gods, of talent and sensitivity? I myself confess to a base craving, from time to time, to be a suit, working in the City. I envy their smugness, their masters of the universe attitude. I know it sounds so last year, with the financial crisis, but the suits will always be with us.
On a different note - I have been rereading some pages of Malraux’s Antimemoires “Car c’est en Inde que se sont le plus largement déployées les ailes nocturnes de l’humanité…” His telling of Vishnu’s famous trick on the sage Narada is simply gorgeous and draws tears to the eyes: “Fetch me water, for I am thirsty….arriving in the village, a young girl opens the door and throws her arms around his neck. His arrival had been awaited since forever…and thus he knows the feel of mud between his toes, in the rice field, the pink flame of the cow dung fires at nightfall, the release of sleep after a day’s backbreaking work… until one day comes the flood”.
Some people always think of Malraux as pompous, the writer who became a minister out of love of “la gloriole”, the guy who did everything – going to fight in the Spanish civil war, or on explorations of the Arabian desert and of Central Asia – just to stay in the limelight. I find him brave, humble and actually fun loving. When he starts writing the Antimemoires, he has been sent to China by de Gaulle to get over his suicidal tendencies, made particularly bad by his son’s death in car accident. True, sometimes the Antimemoires can be unbearably stuffy and gloomy ( that obsession with death) and it is weird to see Stalin, Nehru and Mao all brooding and speaking like Malraux. But why does nobody think that Malraux did all the things he did, all the exploring and warring and politicking simply because he wanted to have fun, and be away from his gloomy obsessions ? He was a restless, virile kind of guy, who liked to be where the action was. We always think of virile men as being physically strong and heavily built – a laughable and absurd notion.
I feel so lucky that I picked up the Antimemoires when I was 17, it gave me such a wide picture of the world, away from the self righteous preaching by creepy shits like Sartre, whom I find genuinely nihilistic and soul destroying.
1 May 2009
Just a few hurried lines ( I am drowning in work since the past few months and there is no end in sight to it), after a short trip in Cairo, to say how much I found it pretty much like Delhi: the crazy driving, the men’s staring ( if not more) at foreign women, the Islamic architecture, the big and decrepit train station, the haggling over prices. I felt like I was back in India in 1998. Back then that had been my first trip out of Mauritius, at the ripe old age of 27. I had despaired of ever going abroad one day.
Our visit to the Pyramids, on the afternoon of the second day, took place after lunch in a KFC and was followed by a stroll in a posh downtown area in the evening. This gave a solid feeling of irreality to the experience. Upon arriving by subway in the suburb of Giza, we took a taxi who brought us deep in a poor neighbourhood, and stopped at a stable of horses and camels deep . A wall ran behind the stable and the owner of the place assured us that he was the “government tourist office” and that we absolutely had to hire one of his animals to reach the pyramids coz “there are no roads to there”. We had fallen in a major tourist trap but we had no choice but to give in, as we were worried about the access being closed, as it was already late in the day. So we were soon riding on a horse and a camel up a steep desert track towards the pyramids, which were on a desert plateau just at the end of the neighbourhood.
As soon as we were a bit out of town, we were wrapped in that eerie silence of the desert. The sky was very blue, a late afternoon blue and the pyramids, which were just a few dunes away, looked extremely remote and, well, mysterious.
The strangeness of the experience lay in the speed with which, suddenly, we were out of the busy town, riding in the desert towards, of all things in the world, the pyramids, the most out-of-the-way, utterly mysterious monuments in the world, and then one hour later, we were back in the town with its dusty suburbs, and its posh downtown hotels ( night saw us entering the Intercontinental, trying to look like rich tourists, so as to visit its toilet, and afterwards we had dinner in a Pizza hut). It was as if, on the way from work in downtown New York to his home in New Jersey, someone had left the highway to drop by on the ruins of Atlantis, half emerging from the sea just over the cliffs.
I could not help but think that it was like a sort of metaphor about the mind, or the ego: Cairo, with its statues of important men, its national museums and theaters, its shopping streets roaring with people at night, its bazaars and military academies – all life, bustle, hurry and worry of money and self importance. And just at the fingertip of one of its grubbier suburbs, the outlandish pyramids, frozen , or rather baked, in the eternal sands. Not to mention the even more freakishly strange Sphinx. All yellow, brown and orange below, and the shining blue sky above. The massive pyramids, the treacherous, shifting sands, and the ethereal sky. The odd feeling one gets, when looking at them, that they look more like the concluding statement of a civilization than its first effort ( let’s not get into conspiracy theories or pseudo history, though).
Monday, April 06, 2009
The other day I was thinking again of what I had written about the difficulty of judging people. I had asked : how do you judge rulers, given that the scope of their actions is so vast, that their effects are so complex, and can entail misery for some and benefit for others. Then I realized something, one of these things that are so obvious that you wonder how come you didn’t realize it a long time ago：there is an evil beauty about being part of the elite, something with a taint of the demoniac or the sadistic, in the sense that when you are of the ruling class, it is the others who bear the brunt of your actions. Of course you are also affected, but not that much. You are like the great ironclad battleships, it takes a lot of torpedoes to sink you. Actually, come to think of it, when you are of the ruling class, you can so easily do damage to others, even by the most innocent or well-meaning of your actions. Scott mc Fitzgerald also felt that, in the Great Gatsby, when he said of that rich couple (I think the girl’s name was Daisy) : “they were tiring people, Daisy and…, they messed up others’ lives, then they retreated into their money”.
Speaking of Scott McFitzgerald, I don’t know much about the subject, but I have a feeling that in his days, people had a powerful feeling that the rich were a race apart, an attractive and dangerous people. I’m thinking of “Gatsby”, and of “The adventures of Augie March” by Saul Bellow, and “the talented Mr Ripley” by Patricia Highsmith.
Nowadays, the truly rich are more discreet. Or rather, people spend much more time reading about pop stars, actors and sportsmen when they want to dream of glamour. That group is an odd species, most of them are from the middle class/ working class, and behave that way. Think of Victoria Beckham, who so actively behaved like a nouveau riche, even when she wasn’t yet there. By doing that, she actually emphasized so strongly her middle classness. So, pop stars, actors and sportsmen are ambiguous creatures, in that they can be awesomely rich yet they never try to behave like aristocrats, on the contrary they seem to work hard to retain something of the common touch. Those who try to do otherwise risk a fall from popular favour. Think, for example, of Nicole Kidman who by some trick of nature, or twist of character, always looks a pretty aloof person, and seems so very disliked because of that.
Up to probably around 1940, someone like Ms Kidman would probably have been idolised precisely because of that something glacial about her personality. People then were still addicted to the sexy unreachableness of aristocrats, their distant manners and exotic codes of behaviour, and the danger of trying to rub shoulders with them, when they could so easily play with you and leave you pregnant, heartbroken or humiliated.
Ours is an age of middle class comfort and fuzziness, nowadays the rich about whom we care and fantasize about must feel like people whom we believe that if we actually met them somewhere, say in a bar, we’d just strike a conversation with them and could even marry them, and our life would afterwards be a sort of enlarged version of being middle class, just having a bigger house and more jewelry but still somehow remaining within the same norms of behaviour.
However, the financial crisis is probably changing our view of the rich, in the sense that it has rudely woken us from our comfortable fantasies about actors and singers, and made us realize that all along, there was another class of rich people, the real rich people, the bankers and financiers who don’t do harmless movies, but do real business moves which have enormous impacts on our lives. All of a sudden, we are realizing, like our peasant ancestors did for thousands of years before us, that our lives are hostage to the fantasies and follies of the powerful. If your king wanted to invade the neighbouring kingdom, that meant your village would have to suffer the horrors of war. Many a thing had remained the same, but we were lulled into a feeling of comfort.
Posted by upunge at 6:23 AM 0 comments
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)