Feb 28, 2009

From Tasso

Torquato Tasso, Gierusalemme Liberata, Book xvi, xiv-xv:

Deh mira (egli cantò) spuntar la rosa
Dal verde suo modesta e virginella,
Che mezzo aperta ancora e mezzo ascosa,
Quanto si mostra men, è più bella:
Ecco poi nudo il sen già baldanzosa
Dispiega: ecco poi langue, e non par quella,
Quella non par, che desiata avanti
Fu da mille donzelle e mille amanti.

Cosi trapassa al trapassar d'un giorno
Della vita mortale ul fiore e'l verde:
Nè, perchè faccia indientro april ritorno,
Si rinfiora ella mai, nè si rinvendre.

Edward Fairfax, 1600, translates:

"The gently budding rose," quoth she, "behold,
That first scant peeping forth with virgin beams,
Half ope, half shut, her beauties doth upfold
In their dear leaves, and less seen, fairer seems,
And after spreads them forth more broad and bold,
Then languisheth and dies in last extremes,
Nor seems the same, that decked bed and bower
Of many a lady late, and paramour;

"So, in the passing of a day, doth pass
The bud and blossom of the life of man,
Nor e'er doth flourish more, but like the grass
Cut down, becometh withered, pale and wan:

And Piotr Kochanowski in 1616:

Widzicie różą, co wpół wychylona
Dopiero swoje opowiada przyście
I wpół zawarta a wpół rozwiniona
Jeszcze niedosłe ukazuje liście.
Patrzcie jako się ledwie wypełniona
Rozwija, a już więdnie oczywiście;
Więdnie - i już sie nie godzi na wieńce
Ani na panny, ani na mlodzieńce.

Takci śmiertelnych rodzajów na świecie
Przemija ten kwiat wesołej młodości;
I choć się kwiecień wraca w każdem lecie,
On więcej nie kcie, i zbywa piękności.

Feb 27, 2009

On Beauty

In the usual sort of internet discussion, in which one gropes for ages to find out his opponent's position only to lose him or her just as one begins to make some traction, someone once argued against me that it was Plato's great contribution (to what?) to conceive of beauty as a concept.

I didn't think that was much of an achievement: Indoeuropean languages form nouns with great ease: small children do it, why not Plato. The more important further point which I was aiming to make, but couldn't because the offended champion of Plato suddenly disappeared, was that Indoeuropean languages make nouns out of adjectives without any regard as to whether doing so makes any sense or serves any purpose. And because nouns are easily made, and easily understood, such constructions appear to make sense -- strike us with a certain force of conviction -- even when they are actually utterly meaningless.

This is what trips up Mary Mothersill in her On beauty: she put a lot of energy into trying to narrow down the concept of beauty, which is not a concept but a meaningless grammatical construction. If she owe this to Plato, then she owes him a great deal of confusion; his supposed great contribution would therefore seem to be not to knowledge or understanding; but to rendering the debate confused and therefore potentially endless.

(Perhaps this is what my interlocutor had meant when he praised Plato for it: perhaps he is one of those pomo people who think that knowledge is impossible anyway but meaningless and circular discourse in itself represents value and should be kept up; and anything that does is therefore virtuous).

But, in truth, while it makes sense to say "X is beautiful" (it really means "I find X beautiful"), the term "beauty" makes no analytical sense at all. There is no such thing.

Mothersill spends a great deal of time trying to identify the "good-making characteristics" of the Wordsworthian phrase "trailing clouds of glory". (The term she takes to mean "beautiful-making", but this surely is a mistake since good and beautiful should not be presumed to be the same). Now, she looks for the good-making characteristics with the expectation that such characteristics might tell us something about beauty. In fact, nothing is further from the truth: if they could tell us anything at all it would be something about Mary Mothersill: about the sort of things she finds beautiful and therefore about the special manner in which her brain works. (Mine, by the way, works differently: "trailing clouds of glory" leaves me cold).

If one were to insist on making nouns using the word "beauty" one could propose that there is such a thing as "the experience of beauty" - a certain state of mind, similar in nature to such states as fear or sleepiness - "feeling" seems a better word to describe it than "emotion". One could add that the state is almost certainly produced in us by a dedicated brain gizmo, or set of brain gizmos working in tandem (because that's how the experiences of fear and sleepiness are produced); that the experience feels similar enough from person to person for us to be able to describe it ("phenomenologically") with reasonable hope that most our listeners will understand what we mean by comparing our description with their own experience; and that the experience serves an important role in natural selection and survival, helping us pick suitable sexual partners, wholesome food, safe dwellings, etc. One could then say that when we are faced with such objects, we experience beauty (or "we find them beautiful"; or "we say: they are beautiful").

But that really is all one could say about "beauty". As there is nothing a suitable sexual partner has in common with a wholesome apple, except that we find them both beautiful to look at, there is nothing we can abstract from their common characteristics. Indeed, there is often nothing that two suitable sexual partners have in common (since all the things that a large buxom blond and a petite brunette have in common are not their "beautiful-making characteristics" but ordinary primary and secondary sexual traits). The most the two can have in common is that they both excite the same experience of beauty in someone else's mind: i.e. stimulate the same gizmo but probably each by a different pathway.

And that is all that can be said sensibly using the Indoeuropean noun "beauty". Everything else is a waste of time -- as over two and a half millenia of western aesthetics clearly shows.

Feb 26, 2009

Our Mutual Friends

Our Mutual Friends, who are a homosexual couple, live, as the popular phrase has it, well over the top. They rent a huge traditional house in a gigantic garden, with all modicons, and pay well over the market price for it. They rent their car and their motorcycles. Since arriving a year ago, they have expanded their household staff from three to six and have tripled their salaries. They entertain lavishly, attend all the charity events, and hobnob with all the rich, famous, and glamorous. And they shop, shop, shop, always paying the top dollar (if not usually buying the top drawer).

They also say that they are at their rope's end.

And they say it frequently.

This has become a puzzle for most of us; and a worry for some who, Asian-like, wonder whether one day they'll have to step in and bail Our Mutual Friends one day.

Our Mutual Friends told me that -- that they do not make enough to afford their standard of living -- at our first meeting. They said "we still have to work". Mildly curious (there isn't any work one can do around here to support himself in such a style so anyone who works arouses curiosity) I asked what work; they said it was interior decoration for some clients back in the US, now mostly complete. Further inquiry revealed that there didn't seem to be any work going on. I decided the work was the usual fairy-tale of the habitually gainfully employed when they first find themselves in retirement -- purposeless and therefore, to their own eyes, mildly meaningless.

But it later emerged in discussions with other mutual friends that Our Mutual Friends were actually making efforts at raising funds. One proposed to sell his paintings (he paints abstract acrylics); the other suggested that they could have a garage sale to liquidate some fabrics and some minor collectibles. Neither was much of an effort, but it was an effort nevertheless; and all of it was attended by the unceasing complaints that there wasn't enough coming in.

In various discussions with other mutual friends I have always argued that Our Mutual Friends were putting on an act; that it was a pretense; a smoke-screen; a camouflage. The well off often resort to camouflage, I argued: it isn't only in order to keep a low profile against possible burglars or kidnappers, but also in order to protect themselves against ordinary envy, too.

Here I told an anecdote: while in college, I worked, among others, in a research lab with half-a-dozen other student-part-timers. Wages were poor and standard of living student-like. But one of us, Mary, turned out to be well off: she owned the house she lived in; it was bought, she told us, with her grandfather's legacy left to her. That and the sports car. And the tuition. And who knows what else. She worked in the lab, it turned out, for the experience; and perhaps for company, but not out of any kind of need.

The admission that she'd had it all from grandpa was to cost Mary dearly. Out of envy, she became everyone's favorite punching bag. I once witnessed someone at a party, drunk, telling her that she should be ashamed of herself that she had it so easy while we all barely managed to scratch our living. Mary once cried upon my shoulder about it; knight-like, I refused to take advantage of the situation, though Mary was not a bad looking girl; instead, I advised her in the future to hold her tongue. And I am sure she has.

I have therefore argued strenuously that Our Mutual Friends, unable to keep a low profile (and it is hard to keep a low profile when one loves living glamorously, which, for some reason, seems such a wonderfully gay crime) were engaging in a spot of deception about their true net worth; that, in other words, they were trying to have it both ways: to have the rich life but disclaim the resources necessary to have it. (Oh, pay no attention to this, it is all on credit you know, and about to be repossessed, too!)

Other mutual friends were not having any of this. Their conversation often turned here to other speculation: that perhaps Our Mutual Friends, being about sixty, were the first cohort of the modern American way of life, the cohort born in the prosperity which had followed World War Two; raised on the consume-til-you-drop ethos -- that special state of PR in which everyone tells you to spend and absolutely no one tells you to save; the cohort which arrives at the age of retirement having had a high current income all their lives, having spent all of it on a very high life-style, and having nothing other than the bare state pension to show for the lifetime of their labors.

I have known examples of this: over the last several years a fifty-one-year old lover confessed, with a note of panic in her voice, that she'd had to get serious about saving for her retirement and therefore could no longer afford to come and see me; a once-colleague from work, forty-nine, confided in me that though his annual income is in the top 1% bracket of the United States, he has nearly nothing in the bank (nine hundred dollars, to be exact) and a huge balance on his cards (thirty-thousand-plus) and that therefore a loss of his job would mean a financial Armageddon; and my aunt, sixty two, asked me how she could retire early on her lifetime savings of... twenty thousand bucks. (I could not see any way).

Marketing studies exist, executed for major investment banks, which show that these are not isolated cases but part of the general pattern: the high income-high consumption crowd, all those mid level managers on expense accounts and such, are in fact totally and utterly broke. Their salaries and bonuses go entirely into maintenance of their expensive life style.

Our Mutual Friends may be part of the same phenomenon. Now that they have retired, they do not know how to scale down the lifestyle, yet do not have enough to keep it up.

We all shook our heads over them: my elder West-European friends, who'd grown up with the shortages of the post-war years and have, through them, learned to save for the rainy day; my East-European friends, who'd grown up with the shortages of the communist era; and my South East Asian friends, who'd grown up with the shortages of -- well -- South East Asia. We all shook our heads at these Americans; and the American economic miracle which, it seemed to us, was now revealed to have been built on sand.

But then, our disputations about the financial position of Our Mutual Friends took a magically tragic turn when, in the car, standing at a traffic light, in the pouring rain, my friend Pong suddenly gasped: "I think they are going to commit suicide."

And then it all fell into place: yes, of course, that's what they will do: they will keep on spending at the current rate until there is nothing left and then they will pour themselves a sumptuous bath, open a bottle of Dom Perignon, and, with the tip of a fine silver blade, they will, like Petronius and Seneca before them, open their veins.

Perhaps it takes a great philosopher to conceive and execute such a plan. Spinoza was one to do so: though he'd not taken his life, he'd managed to die leaving behind him nothing but the 18 shillings it took to provide him with a decent burial. Childless, he had no one to leave his money to; and since in his life he had known no kindness from anyone, he'd seen no reason to leave his money to anyone. So he calculated his needs down the the last shilling, and when it was all gone, he died.

Feb 25, 2009

Théo Angelopoulos dixit

In an Radio France interview (La Voix Nue), Théo Angelopoulos, cinéaste:

Nous sommes a la epoque catatonique... il n'y a pas de la goût de la vie, de la joie de la vie. Il n'y a pas rien que nous excite. Je voie la jeunesse: elle n'y a pas de la courage, n'a pas de joie de vivre; n'y a pas rien apart la cariere. La jeunesse n'a pas de souffle. C'est la faute de la societe: la societe ils n'a il n'y a donne de pression... Nous vivons a la epoque tres triste. Le cinema d'aujourdui c'est plus en plus le cinema de compromis...

Easy to say he has lost a taste for life: all men are inclined to say that things were better in the past, when they were young (Angelopoulos is now seventy two).

Yet, though I do not remember what life was like in the 50's and 60's, when, he says, 'the streets of Paris seemed to sing' and only know the West of 80's and 90's, which Angelopoulos would probably qualify as "nowadays" (the dull, stifling nowadays); and for this reason cannot compare the nowadays to the (presumably) better, more interesting, more exciting past; yet, I recognize the thought as very familiar: the present of the West does seem to me dull.

Very, very dull.

And the youth do seem bored. Bored and boring (the distinction is purely grammatical, it means the same thing).

Feb 24, 2009

Some notes on cultural identity and the definition of culture

Abdellah does not observe Ramadan. But he springs to its defense: it purifies one, is good for health, and so forth. And Khadija, though she does not keep halal, defends the concept: in ancient times pork and various creepy-crawlies were not safe to eat, etc. Like most of their compatriots, my Moroccan friends defend from the criticism of outsiders religious practices which they themselves do not practice.

It is part of a mechanism which obtains everywhere in the world in precisely the same way: one is prepared to criticize his own country in front of foreigners provided that the foreigners will play along and strenuously object to the critique. The French will say in front of you "France is corrupt to its very core!" or "The French are lazy!" as long as you do your bit and exclaim: "Mais, non!" But let the foreigner say that the French are corrupt, and the French will make a 180-degree and jump to defend the honor of France.

This is precisely that my Maroccan friends are doing: they are defending Morocco from foreign critique. Imagined critique, in my case, since neither halal nor Ramadan appear worthy of critique to my mind; they are just two more of the odd practices people practice all over the world. They range pretty low in oddness on that oddity scale which includes ritual cannibalism and child-marriages. And why not let people indulge in whatever oddities strike them?

What is interesting here is why Abdellah and Khadija would defend religious practices they do not practice: because they identify them somehow as theirs. It reminds me of a Japanese student I once knew in the US: when asked to define the essence of Japaneseness, he (predictably) mumbled something about the Emperor. Asked to say more about it, he clammed up. He clammed up because, in fact, like most Japanese, he neither knew anything about the emperor, nor cared a fig. Yet, all Japanese are in the same boat: they all think the Emperor is somehow central to their identity. He isn't.

Our cultural identity is something much smaller, much plainer, much more basic, and much more homey than all of the high fellutin' stuff we imagine it to be.

A Pakistani fellow runs a blog about Islam; in it he describes a weekly practice from his childhood -- a close reading of the Quran. Once a week, a mullah came to the house and the family sat around on the floor, reading and discussing the Quran while eating mountains of parathas and buckets of curd. I wrote him a note about how much I missed the parathas and the curd; but he ignored it: he could not be bothered about silly things like parathas and curd because, he imagined, these things were inconsequential. What mattered to him was the Quran. Or rather he thought it should matter to him.

But that's a misperception: what matters to most Pakistanis is the parathas and the curd; the food, the dress, the way of sitting and greeting. Hence the brouhaha about the hijab: that the hijab has no Quranic source should be sufficient to show to everyone that the argument is not religious; it is a fight concerning an established daily practice; daily practice is what matters to us.

It is these things -- the small, pithy, seemingly inconsequential daily practices, so easy to miss when one focuses his sight on big picture things very far away -- that make up our shared cultural identity. It is also these things which provide greatest pleasure for those learning a new culture.

And this is where European philosophers err when they urge Judeo-Christian foundations of European culture. The true foundations of European culture are bread baked in loaves, grape wine and malt beer, bacon, pork trotter, chicken soup, kidney pie and sausages; tables, forks, beds on legs, houses with windows facing outside, fireplaces and hanging chandeliers.

In fact, viewed in this light, there is not one Europe, but two: the south with wheat bread, grape wine, coffee, olives and figs; and the north with rye bread, beer, cucumbers, cabbages and tea.

Our "great" philosophers have been right about spotting a great division within Europe, but they were wrong assigning this difference to the divide between Protestantism and Catholicism.

Feb 23, 2009

Apollo on Baxandall on Piero della Francesca

I was reading in bed this afternoon: my favorite writer (Baxandall), on my favorite painter (Piero della Francesca). Or rather trying to, but Apollo kept distracting me:



Feb 22, 2009

That Morocco is part of Europe

Georges Steiner, in his Une certaine idée de l'Europe:

Les cafés caractérisent l'Europe. Ils vont de l'établissement préféré de Pessõa à Lisbonne aux cafés d'Odessa, hantés par les gangsters d'Isaac Babel. Ils s'étirent des cafés de Copenhague, devant lesquels passait Kierkegaard pendant ses promenades méditatives, aux comptoirs de Palerme. Pas de cafés anciens ou caractéristiques à Moscou, qui est déjà un faubourg de l'Asie. Très peu en Angleterre, après une mode éphémère au XVIIIe siècle. Aucun en Amérique du Nord, sauf dans cette antenne française qu'est La Nouvelle-Orléans. Dessinez la carte des cafés, vous obtiendrez l'un des jalons essentiels de la "notion d'Europe".

Clearly, Georges has never been to Tangier.

Feb 21, 2009

The Steiner interview continued

Steiner’s claim that women can’t create on account of their being able to give birth is a great pink flabby baton with which to epater les femmes: it is so obviously false – and yet it is totally unfalsifiable because it is so sweeping and because anyone wishing to contest it has to first face the difficult job of proving that such a thing as creativity exists, what it means, and that it is worth having. What a way to kill several hundred afternoons in pleasant female company in sweet assurance of never having to concede a thing. It’s a lot like infuriating a turkey by opening and closing a red umbrella at it through a fine chickenwire mesh; very like it, yes, but a lot more fun.

But Steiner’s claim that women have too much “bon sense” to seek to excel in science or math is not, as the interviewer has it, macho. It’s so obviously bon sense. Of course it is bon sense not to waste one’s time on abstract scientific experiments or mathematical formulas when one can spend the same time in good company with people one loves. Especially when the good company is of opposite sex and the companionship of the intimate variety. I find this so obvious; why does not Laure Adler (the interviewer)? And if not, why not? What is the point of her insisting that women of course are as interested in math and science as men and that – NO, they do not have the better sense not to waste their precious time in competing in meaningless competitions for mostly empty scientific honors? Does she really want to equal men in math more than she wants to be happy?

As for me, I spent this afternoon in pleasant female company by the pool; it did not for a moment occur to me to quit the company, closet myself in my studio and work at a mathematical paradox of some sort or another instead. What would that prove? That I am unable to assure myself of pleasant female company? Or that I take no interest in the opposite sex?

Feb 20, 2009

Atiq Rahimi

Asked (on Radio France) that most European of questions -- whether he felt French or Afghan (what a silly question: why does one need to feel any such thing?) -- Atiq Rahimi replied with the old saw of all emigrants: I feel Afghan in France, French in Afhganistan.

I myself don't have any such feelings. Wherever I am, I am merely a passer-by. There is a great comfort in that, not having to belong, not being obliged by whatever the natives do. One can then pick and choose from what is on offer: float floats on Loi Krathong, but refuse to hate the Burmese, for example. The decision is purely one of pleasure; one is not compelled to it by any false desire to be in any particular way; to be anything other than what one is pleased to be.

Atiq would probably manage to feel this way, too, if he had lived in more than two places for any length of time. There is a sense in which emigration -- straddling two cultures -- is liberating -- one begins to see the limits of each of his two civilizations; but that is at best a half-way house to true freedom and that is something approached only asymptotically as one piles on his cultural exposure. The more cultures one learns, the more one learns to tell the difference between the local -- the accidental-- and the universal and never changing. And the more one can be neither Afghan nor French but -- himself.

Feb 19, 2009

Why did Dharma etc. 2

Watching the young monk's idyllic life high up in the mountains, beautiful, stress free and quiet, I wondered why he needed to liberate himself further. The explanation, I suppose, was -- guilt. He had abandoned his mother to the care of a younger sibling and went off to please himself. The thought that his happiness had been purchased at the cost of an act of desertion gnawed at him, ruining his pleasure.

In the bliss of my own mountain hermitage, I do not have such feelings. I am liberated. I am calm. I am at peace.

My sister had once explained to me how in high school, when one thought her boyfriend was about to dump one, one dumped him first. My strategy, I suppose, has been the opposite: when you want to be rid of someone behave in a manner which makes it inevitable for them to dump you.

Really, in the words of a famous general invited to fire first at his enemies: "We gentlemen of France never fire first. Do you, sirs, give fire!"

Feb 18, 2009

More on Georges Steiner

Thirty years later, I find myself just as unable to converse with Americans, and, more broadly speaking, all English-speakers, as I was back then, fresh off the boat. It is as if, over the last thirty years of my life, I have learned nothing: nothing, that is, that I could talk to them about. Of course, in these thirty years, I did learn a great deal; and much of it through the medium of the English language; but when it comes to conversations with English speakers, I have made no progress. I am still stuck in 1979.

The result is a paradox: here I am writing in my second-best language, one which I have come to love for its succinctness and clarity, whose rhythm has become my second nature; but all I can say in it are things disagreeable to my most likely readers – its native speakers. Really, when I do write in English it seems that all I can do is to try to explain to Anglo-Saxons how differently the rest of the world thinks and feels; and why.

Or rather – and this amounts to nearly the same thing – why I cannot be like them.

They of course do not care. They don't care about me -- and why should they: what I say is neither agreeable nor useful; but, more importantly, they do not care about the rest of the world. As far as they are concerned, it seems it is much easier to make the rest of the world think and feel the American way: American clothes, American food, American feelings. Americans have no interest in the outside world. And why not? It appears to be working: the world is happy to adopt the American ways, or at least pretend it does. And thus my subject matter -- the un-American part of the world -- may well cease to be one day.

Thus, in the end, the only target of all my writing is – myself. Now, I do not mean that it cannot be read with interest. It can be: I once ran a relatively successful English-language blog with lots of readers and extensive comments. Many were disappointed when I stopped writing it, but certainly none was as disappointed as I was while I still ran it: my readers’ comments regularly left me with two impressions: that many did not understand what I wrote, even though I tried to write clearly and simply; it was as if my writing washed over them, leaving no trace on their minds; and that others, those who did seem to understand the argument, had absolutely nothing interesting to add.

A question, then: were I to write in a different language, would I be more likely to find someone -- anyone -- able of commenting intelligently upon my writing? Of disagreeing with me, correcting my analyses, pointing out my errors? Would I find a relevant interlocutor; in short: more than a mere reader? Would I find a conversation partner? And interlocutor?

I wonder: if things had gone differently, if my parents had chosen an European asylum and my second language had been destined to be either German or French, would I have fared better? Would I have been able to adapt better to the country and its language? Would it be easier for me to find relevant interlocutors? And if so, would I have stayed in my new country? Would I have missed out on all my discoveries in Asia? (And given all that Asia has taught me, would I be as a result a more shallow person?)

This is one reason why it is so gratifying to note that I am making progress in French: there is a vague hope that I might learn an answer to the above question; perhaps I will feel better in French? Perhaps, once I learn to converse in French, I will find better conversations?

Yet, because of my age, it seems unlikely that I will ever learn French well enough to have intelligent, in-depth conversations in it; or write good, interesting, well-written essays in it; or even to keep this blog.

Or perhaps I could?

Should I?

Feb 17, 2009

How did Georges Steiner do it?

Listening to an interview with Georges Steiner on Radio France last night, I was struck by two thoughts:

First, how immensely my French has improved by virtue of just one short visit to Morocco. All the listening and reading and watching of TV5 over a period of two years, though it has laid that slow laborious foundation of the success that followed, was like carving rock with bare hands. Compared to it that one month last summer was… a picnic. I didn’t even realize I was working. Yet, it opened my ears to the language the way priests open the eyes of divine statues. How delightfully surprising: I had thought that at my age I had no real hope to learn yet another language well. I now feel encouraged to redouble my efforts at French; and resume my Persian.

And, secondly, I wondered at how Georges Steiner did it. He must have found himself in the US at about the same age as I. Yet, unlike me, he’d found no problem, it would seem, adjusting, fitting in, and settling down. He’d even managed to acquire an odd accent in his own native French. How very remarkable.

Perhaps meeting Niels Bohr and Oppenheimer and all the other luminaries he mentions in the first interview, and meeting them so early in life, right at the outset of his American experience, made all the difference. Perhaps they (a German, a Dane) came to exemplify the US to his mind; and not the sort of definitely second-rate people it became my fate to encounter in my first encounter with the US.

Or perhaps the times were different. It was his lot to arrive in the US at the outset of World War Two. Perhaps there was an upwelling of patriotism; an intoxicating enthusiasm for those principles so much at the forefront of the propaganda war and so much worth defending – democracy, personal liberty, self-determination, life; a catchy kind of enthusiasm which was perhaps already lacking in the Unites States I first saw in 1979?

I had been brought up in Eastern Europe amidst a general longing for those very things; as I reached puberty – the time when one becomes first truly conscious of himself – there was taking place all around me a flowering of these longings; shortly after I left they would break out in the Solidarity strikes. While I was still there, one could feel a groundswell rising; something was going to happen: there were samizdats; people talked; kids at school engaged in small time political demonstration; there were strikes in 1976; then K.O.R. and the Radom trials; then, for added drama, Pyjas, a young student activist barely older than me, was murdered by the U.B. Everyone whispered about it.

Impressed by all this, I'd come to imagine myself living, and possibly even dying, for the cause. By the time I was sixteen I had made up my mind to enter politics at the business end, as a dissident. I had found a circle of like-minded friends; was introduced to older, mature, serious activists. Everything seemed to be coming into place. I had a dream and it seemed about to be fulfilled.

Now, for a sixteen-year-old, purpose can be an important matter; it can mean as much as meaning; and for young, naive people, the difference between having a purpose and not having one can be one between everything and nothing.

My parents’ decision to emigrate therefore came as a shock: it deprived me of all that rather rudely. I remember myself fresh out of the country, going out for long walks in Sweden -- our first stop on our flight from Eastern Europe -- trying to figure out what to do next, how to think of my life, what purpose to give it. Rather romantically, I imagined myself (to quote the rather bad poetry I wrote at the time) a beam of light from an extinguished star still traveling in space. Pathetic words can unjustly ridicule the pathos of the situation they try to describe.

Compared to what I was used to, the American youth I would soon meet were a terrible surprise: they did not have a purpose as I understood it; they did not seem to hang desperately onto any transcendent principles. This made them seem devoid of passion: their principal concerns seemed to be cars and girls. Somehow it all seemed terribly shallow, empty, and ignoble to me.

That they didn’t seem to match my wits did not help, either. And perhaps they did not: I’d gone from the most sophisticated city of my country to one of the less sophisticated cities in the United States; while there, I was probably punching under my weight. But then because my interlocutors were Americans they could not possibly have been expected to do well in European discussions, either. Of course Americans don’t know Turgenev; or Prince Igor; why should they? (Do Europeans know honky-tonk? Indeed, it gives Americans great credit to know Sheherezade). I was expecting my American interlocutors to live up to a standard of conversation which in the US of A was entirely meaningless.

(Then again, unlike Europeans, Americans are not intellectual poseurs: by and large they don’t care to fake knowing things. To say “I didn’t know that” in America passes for simple honesty; in Europe it's a measure of stupidity. Most Europeans are not half as well read as they appear: they are merely great masters of creating such an impression. Most European conversations aren’t therefore as intelligent as they may appear; but semblances of intelligent conversations).

I didn’t know any of that then. I only knew that I was unable to have a conversation with anyone. And I longed to be among people with whom I could talk.

Things did not get any more idealistic as time went on; nor did the conversations appear to improve in college. Soon it became clear to me that they would never improve and that I would have to leave. Unable to go back east, the way I had come, I went west – and kept following the sun until I found myself in the East again – the Far East. And here I have stayed. For some reason, some reason I do not quite understand, I had found the Far East more familiar, more welcoming. It seemed to fit me better.

Perhaps it did because there are certain important ways in which all traditional societies -- whether in Europe or in Asia -- are alike (especially when they are contrasted with the ultra-new United States): family structure, the way people think of personal identity, of friendships, of love, of sex, money, and careers; of the things they want for themselves; even the way they want them (insufficiently ruthlessly for the most part).

Or perhaps the Far East suited me better because I had come here not expecting it to; perhaps I had come expecting myself to do the hard work of fitting in – and as a result, did the work, too. I do not think I’d gone to the United States in quite the same frame of mind. There I had not expected to have to work to fit in. Raised in the typically Eastern European mindset of us (Westerners) against them (Russians), I had imagined that America would be just like home, only better; while it was in fact nothing like home at all. (In this I was like most Europeans: they think the US is just like Europe; a particularly glaring feat of ignorance). So perhaps all my energy went into the discovery that they are not like us rather than into the work of adaptation.

*


Although the years I have spent in Asia have rewarded me with great riches – I have discovered a great treasure: arts and philosophies and histories and literatures whose existence most westerners do not even suspect; ways of life, of eating, and of love-making without which my life would no doubt be a mere shadow of its current self; yet, there is a part of me which envies Georges Steiner for his ease of adjusting to the United States.

Perhaps there is something very Old-World about that feeling: I had been forced to go on a kind of Odyssey; the Odyssey turned out to be the best thing that had ever happened in my life; yet – a very European thing – I resent the pains and dangers I had been forced to undergo. A nice soft easy landing in the new country, followed perhaps by a pleasant academic career, would have been so much easier, if I had only been able to fit in.

And again, I ask myself, how did Georges Steiner do it?

Feb 16, 2009

The political underpinnings of ugliness at Man Booker

Why did the Man Booker committee award its prize to White Tiger? Its narrator is a half-literate primitive; his language is uninspired, ordinary vulgarity; and his opinions are -- this may sound rude but it is true -- garbage. I cannot see why anyone would want to recommend it to anyone, let alone award it anything.

Perhaps one clue as to why Man Booker did what they did is the blurb: not a sari anywhere, it says. The blurb-maker meant that this would be a refreshing, novel view of India, without the tiger hunts, the elephant safaris and the polo; about an India we have not heard of.

That sounds potentially interesting, but -- why does it have to be so ugly?

Perhaps because a book juror aspiring to with-it-ness wants to reward two things: the tearing down of icons (India of saris and tiger hunts); and a socially responsible subject matter. And can is socially responsible subject matter? As Man Booker takes it, it means just one thing: the lower orders. A kind of race to the bottom ensues as a result: the lower the better.

I do not recall where Russell offered his famous paragraph in defense of the upper orders in which he claimed that they -- the upper orders -- were responsible for the creation of one hundred percent of high brow art. But wherever that was, Man Booker has taken notice and will therefore have nothing to do with that tradition. Welcome to social revolution by aesthetic means: the operative aesthetic theory seems to be "since beautiful means upper classes, and since we want to be as low-class as we can, then please let us do as much UGLY as we can".

Too bad.

Really, too bad. Perhaps the jurors of Man Booker should see a film like Baran: the misery of the lower orders is featured there in spades; and yet the film manages to be hauntingly beautiful.

Really, is it necessary for Man Booker to do this? Are not our lives ugly enough as it is without Man Booker going out of its way to uglify them more? And, as for the lower orders are they, in Man Booker's opinion, so mentally deficient as to be unable to enjoy something pretty? Man Booker should see the saris (yes, saris) of India's poor: they may be cheap, but they are (emphatically) not ugly. They demonstrate that the poor, in their starvation of solace, just like the rich, turn to pretty objects.

Really, no one is so well off that he does not need something pretty in his life. It is not clear what the use of something like White Tiger might be in anyone's life.

Feb 15, 2009

That postmen don't want to be postmen

One of the more interesting ideas of Iranian cinema has been to use non-actors to act themselves. This on the theory (invented elsewhere) that everyone has one great novel in him -- that of his life; hence, it would seem to follow, everyone should be able to act one role perfectly -- himself. Accordingly, Iranian directors have cast postmen as postmen and shoe-makers as shoemakers.

Makhmalbaf's Salam Cinema suggests the theory is based on a bad misperception; it is a house built on quicksand. The film tells of auditions for a film following a newspaper ad. The auditioning site is besieged -- thousands of hopefuls camp outside day and night; when the gates open, there is a stampede and several people get hurt in the ensuing melee. Auditions are taken in groups of ten. In public and before camera, aspirants plead, argue and weep for the shadow of a shadow of a shadow of a chance to act in a film.

Yet, when asked why they want to act, all say the same thing: they want the chance to act someone else. The general populace, it turns out, does not want to be itself. Postment don't want to be postmen; shoemakers don't want to be shoemakers. With one voice they say, in fact, our life sucks. We don't want it.

Feb 14, 2009

A gift for Aline

Out of pity, in part to make her life sweeter, in part to make my conscience lighter, I then gave Aline a gift. It was a Rajasthani tie-die scarf -- I had bought in Udaipur about a decade ago from a weavers' coop which no longer exists. It had been first woven in colorless silk with a square grill pattern of imitation silver thread (real silver thread cannot be used in pieces which are intended to be tie-died because it crumbles during the tying process); then it was tied into a great deal of tiny round circles -- one circle to each small square outlined by the silver thread; then gradient-died in a wash of rich purple and dark blue. Before handing the scarf to Aline, I took these photos.

The scarf has always made me think that it was a page from a richly colored and silvered manuscript; a holy book of some kind. Several times I dreamt about trying to decipher it.




Feb 13, 2009

Aline, by the pool

Aline came last Saturday. We spent the day napping by the pool. My laziness – and nap – are easily explained by my poor health and my old age; but hers can only be explained by her physical exhaustion. She works very long hours; and she commutes huge distances in bad weather; and sleeps three nights a week outside her house. And she does all of this for lousy pay.

She was invited to a job interview last month, but it was in another city, the prospective employer did not offer to pay for her to fly, and she had neither time nor money to go by bus. Thus, she’s chained to her present job: it keeps her too busy to prospect for another.

It is a classic economic trap: the job throws off barely enough cash for her to buy an i-pod or a pair of jeans: mere bones thrown her by the system to keep her alive and working; the things she can buy are but a few of the many substitutes for happiness which our system develops with so much genius: ersatz pleasures to feed an ersatz life, a life lived hurriedly in the small interstices between work and sleep.

Which is perhaps why Aline is so sad and quiet: a blown-out candle of a girl.

It hurts me to see her that way: the rambunctious, happy-go-lucky girl, a coffee with whom was once such a balm to my soul, has lost all her exuberant ebullience, all her innocent hope. She has become like all the other girls of her age, polite, dull, sad and -- numb. By now – Aline is 29 – the facts have sunk, her future has been revealed to her; she now knows everything she can expect from life; and it isn't much. What she has is the best she can ever do.

Her only hope now lies in falling in love. And failing that (as it usually does for those who seek in it their salvation) she will in turn, in the natural course of things, begin to think of having children. (And when she does, she will not know, as no one does or ever dares admit, that that is of course, the very end of life: research shows that happiness drops dramatically when children at long last arrive).

(Or perhaps she won’t. We talked a little by the pool about it, and she observed how unhappy those of her friends were who had reproduced: Aline is no Einstein but she is no dummy. But that is now; and we all have a way of forgetting important life lessons, or ignoring them to our own detriment; so who knows if she will not forget herself, eventually).

For now at least, though, Aline does not think of children and pins her hope – unvoiced – on love. Unvoiced, for she does not say it; and since she does nothing to go out and meet men, perhaps also unrealized. But it is there, I can tell. Since her job prospects offer no hope, perhaps love would?

That is a difficult call for her: she has entered, a little early, that phase in life which most northern Thai women enter about 10 years older than she is now, that phase in which they undergo a broadening of faces, neck and shoulders and a general thickening of stature, turning them from reed-like nymphs to bantam-weight boxers. She still has her former swaying reed-like figure, but her face and neck already presage the inevitable things to come.

Aline may have missed her best chance for a great love; and with every day she grows thicker and her chances more remote.

Perhaps this is what happens to all women around late twenties or early thirties: the realization of their limits and the attendant sadness and disappointment. Perhaps this is why older men my age have so much liking for the very young: not so much on account of the youthfulness of their bodies but on the youthfulness of their minds. Like kittens, or puppies, they are so much fun to play with, even when one derives no sexual gratification from the encounters. Every little time we can afford in their company is pure pleasure of life; their joy, totally silly of course, like gold dust rubs off them and onto us and we bask in it for days.

But then they grow up and become women, as the politically correct parlance has it; and seeing them grow up brings on reflections like this: how sad and cruel is life, and how hopeless it is.

Feb 12, 2009

Why Did Dharma Travel East?

The camera work of Why Did Dharma Travel East? was apparently shot under my artistic direction. My photo folder is full of shots exactly like the film’s: dark naked trees against luminous evening sky; surface of the water with reflections of sky, autumn leaves upon it, and fish slinking below; glowing tufts of susuki grass dancing in the sunlight and wind. I have seen a lot of excellent, very beautiful photography these three months, but none which resembled my own in topics and camera angles so much.

This is a mystery: while I am capable of appreciating other work – often with a gasp of surprise (for it would have never occurred to me to see that particular shot) – this camera work seems wholly familiar, it covers a ground which I have already covered myself. The director’s mind and mine have followed the same trajectory; they have come down the same path. It’s no use saying the path is informed by North Asian aesthetics (susuki, bamboo, pine, cherry) – because other North Asian directors do not strike me the same way. That we both started in the same place helps me understand it a little – there are only so many paths through the medina which start in the main souk – but it does not explain why we two have taken the same turn all the way down. It is as if we had walked together.

*

The motto explains the film’s central idea, I think:

“To the disciple who asked What is truth? silently he (Gautama Buddha) showed a flower”.

The flower is not truth; it only symbolizes all those things in life – in fact, nearly all of them – which make the question of truth totally irrelevant.

*

But the film also has a plot: it is the story is of a man “destined” to take care of his blind mother (i.e. he is her oldest son), but who abandons her in order to become a monk; yet, in his hermitage, he is riven by the feelings of guilt. His teacher tells him that love and filial duty are like all other chains of passion: they must be broken in order to attain liberation; it is a noble, courageous and difficult step to take; a necessary step and, for its difficulty, an admirable step.

But the man, struggling in meditation like a tethered cow threshing in a pen (a great photographic sequence) seems unable to free himself of attachment; and attaches himself to his teacher instead. A very long, slow and beautiful scene of cremation follows the teacher’s death: the master had foreseen the ritual as a possible moment of liberation for his student. But will the cremation at last liberate him of his last worldly attachment? Or, on the contrary, will he now find the hermitage unbearably lonely and return to the world defeated? The ending leaves these questions unanswered.

*

China (and in its wake Korea and Japan) are quite unique in having evolved a bi-ideological moral system. On the one hand, there is the official ideology (in China it is expressed by Confucianism) which does what ruling religion does everywhere: it supports the family, business, government, contractual obligations and the rule of law against any rebellion by the individual who may find these institutions oppressive. This is, as Joe Campbell might say, the right hand path, the path of the elder sibling.

And then there is the left hand path, the path of the second born: Buddhism, the philosophy of rebellion. It is preached openly, under full protection of law and general respect, if not exactly in full daylight. It is subversive in the extreme: the state and the family are prisons from which a man must break; emotions, including the “moral ones” (like guilt, obligation, duty, love) are evil and to be avoided; the self does not exist and has no business of existing. In fact, we do not exist; there is no one here; what happens to “us” is therefore immaterial. Each of these paths, the right hand path and the left hand path, exist in full light, are legally recognized and held in general respect (if not always in high regard) and most citizens will be familiar with their teaching. For most people, the philosophy of private life falls somewhere in the middle; the mean generally lies closer to the Confucian ideal perhaps, but when the mean becomes unbearable, there is the escape route – the vent – of Buddhist teaching which says outrageous things like: “it is your duty to abandon your mother”; or “when you see Buddha, kill him”.

It was certainly not any sense of tolerance which allowed the Chinese to evolve this system, so unlike the philosophical tradition of Christian Europe where insistence on theological and moral party line was the norm for millenia and still so in living memory. Perhaps the Chinese simply recognized that the safety valve of Buddhism was indispensable for the better functioning of the society.

Does the relatively high profile of Buddhism in China make it easier for individuals to rebel and for those around them to accept the rebellion? Perhaps. If so, the question in the movie's title could be interpreted as a complaint of the West.

Incidentally, it seems very hard to make a successful film about music

just as it is very hard to write a good book about it. It's hard to find words to say what music says or does to us because it is all non-verbal, from another part of the brain. Most films and books about music fail because the authors either end up making vague but grossly exaggerating poetic claims about the value or importance of music; or they end up making a work about musicians instead, whom they do not know and imagine to be strange, other-worldly beings.

Feb 11, 2009

The Music Teacher

The attraction of The Music Teacher was very easy to explain to Madame (because Madame is a queen): beautiful interiors, full of Chinese lacquer screens; European Japanoiserie vases, marble busts; elegant ladies with their hair up in long-necked lace blouses wrapped in rich Paisley shawls; a noble-looking, perfectly dressed older gentleman in an open carriage with a younger lady, on a tree-lined avenue, in spring time: profoundly felt tragic words, a sudden spring squall. The story is preposterously silly; but with visuals like that, who cares?

Feb 10, 2009

A rather deft analogy

That novelists are especially knowledgeable about love – that the knowledge comes with the territory so to speak – could be said to be as true as the claim that bankers are especially well qualified to run banks well. Which, of course, they aren’t. Oh, they certainly are qualified to run banks – they know how to be boss, how to climb the corporate ladder and fight internal power struggles on the way up, and then how to keep their enemies down once they are on top. But managing the institution for solidity and profits are quite another matter.

Likewise with novelists: they know how to write novels. Whether the novels are in any way a true depiction of life is another matter altogether.

Feb 9, 2009

That Trollope didn't know any women

Trollope’s portrayals of women aren't very convincing. This is true, it seems to me, of all portrayals of women by all Victorian male writers. Such were the times: like in India today, men and women lived gender-segregated lives. The result of gender segregation is incomprehension and mythmaking by the members of one sex about the members of the other.

This explains Trollope. (And Conrad – a sailor!)

I have noticed before that even today, in our coeducational society, children raised without siblings of similar age and opposite sex tend to have a much harder time understanding the opposite sex in their adulthood (and fewer but far more stormy and complicated romantic relationships). Boys raised like me, on close and intimate terms with several women (both siblings and aunts) tend to get along easier with women, perhaps in part because they have a more pedestrian and practical view of the sex. We are less likely to say silly things of the sort my painting teacher likes to say "the watercolor technique is like women -- it is thoroughly incomprehensible".

Feb 8, 2009

That all men are pigs

Von Kottwitz notes that representations of males in English novels are overwhelmingly negative.

This is understandable in novels authored by men: novel readers are by and large women; men writing novels will therefore, like all men confiding in women, want to say "all men are pigs", because to say so is thought to deliver their real intended message -- "but the fact that I can say so shows amply that I am not and, therefore -- love me".

Why women novelists should want to say that all men are pigs, is less clear. Is it perhaps a matter of trying to earn popularity by appealing to girl-solidarity? (Us-against-them sort of thing).

Thus, English-speaking women are thought by novelists to want to see men portrayed in bad light. The question therefore arises: do they really want to see men in bad light? Or is it another misperception of novelists, another proof that to be a novelist is to be hopelessly cut off from the world?

(After all, sitting all day at a desk writing is not a particularly good way to learn about the world).

Feb 7, 2009

Intimacy, take 2

Twelve times new moon has risen in the East, // twelve months have fallen from the calendar like leaves, // since I’ve set out to emulate with love // the Spartan prose of maitre de Maistre. // My work I judge a remarkable success: // my language here has been forceful and direct, // and, just like the prose of the Neapolitan man, // it’s couched in brave terms // thoughts by and large of limited appeal.

Now I am tired of writing prose// in poor imitation of ordinary speech. // Why clothe plain thoughts in equally plain words? // Wherein lies the interest in ordinary speech? // Let’s let the language be fun to read // at least if the thoughts themselves are but grey mice.

Well then, here goes my first attempt: //

The Intimacy was a disappointment, // a disappointment bound to happen since // it often happens in pursuit of art // that by rifling round it, one stabs himself // upon a work of premeditated dreck. // (This happens less so – thankfully – in film // than in other forms of art wherein // ugliness and unhealth have long since passed // for intellectuàl depth).

The central cònceit of this failing film // had had its promise: // anonym’s lovers who tryst once a week // but do not speak a word only make love // – and tragic disappointment which thereupon strikes // when at long last they do begin to speak. // “I had imagined” they say bitterly // “that you were wiser, better, and more int’resting”. // And thus the adage “Be beautiful and do not speak” // could here be taken to be the film’s main theme: // the beauty of the physical act fast followed // by the disappointing speech // (revealing as it is of minds // fearful, angry, confused and dull). //

Except that the pure ugliness of the sex – // and its astounding brevity // (two minutes on a worn out carpet floor) // mean that it is hard to see why anyone should // have expected better in its wake. // Unless, of course, the heroes thought the sex was great; // and the director wholeheartedly shared // in this quaint view. // Which surely means only one thing: // that people’s sex lives aren’t all that great.

Therein lies surely the source of all my doubt, // the inability to comprehend // my fellow men. // They’re poor and ugly and thanks to this // find goods and pleasures more difficult to find: // than Zobenigo, your true old friend. //They thus prize more highly the more lowly things // because their better – are too hard to find.

Feb 6, 2009

Intimacy

Intimacy was for me an accident at work. It was bound to happen: when digging in art sooner or later one stabs his fingers upon intentional ugliness. (It is remarkable, in fact, how little this happens in art film compared to other genres of purported art – installation par example).

The germ-concept of the script was interesting: two lovers meet once a week to make love; their love making is silent. It is anonymous: they do not know each other at all. This goes on for some time as it appears to suit them both. But eventually they meet outside of their usual setting, learn to know about each other, speak. It turns out a bitter disappointment. “I thought you were silent because you knew something I didn’t, because you were light years ahead of me in some way. How I hoped one day you would choose to speak to me to tell me,” says one of them, meaning “you don’t, you aren’t”: the ancient advice “be beautiful and do not speak” proven true again. I have observed it work: the main reason why Asian women appear desirable is that they are silent and therefore mysterious. Piercing the veil of that mystery destroys all: the holy of holies turns out empty: there isn’t anyone there. It’s all the in the veil. (If you know what is good for you, don’t pierce it. The heroes of intimacy, like most people, do not know what is good for them).

But there’s a problem with the picture: the sex. The disappointment happens when the heroes go from physical intimacy to conversation. It would be understandable because the conversation is so bad; but it is not because, well, the sexual intimacy is also – bad. There is a lot of it, it is pretty explicit and the clear impression is that it is ugly and – brief. The intercourse lasts two minutes, with stiff wind in the back: three. One is hard put to understand what is so great about it that contrasting it with the brains of the partners would turn out disappointing.

The only conclusion seems to be that the film presents average people: people with average brains and average looks and therefore both average possibilities and average expectations. Perhaps for the average sort – who look and talk like that – even this sort of sex is great.

Feb 5, 2009

Abbas Khiarostami: Ambiguity, its uses in art and its limit

In his “Ten on ten” Abbas Khiarostami talks about his ideas about the art of film.

These ideas are to some extent properly his as he’d never gone to school to study film or ever served as anyone’s assistant director. Yet, the ideas he talks about have been around for centuries. One makes art not by adding, but by subtracting, said a philosopher once; anything truly profound needs a mask, said, on another occasion, another; one must hide art with art, said yet another.

The idea that a certain amount of ambiguity in art intensifies the viewer’s experience is as old as art itself.

For Khiarostami the viewer is the person who creates the work of art – the work of art being not the film, but his inward experience. A good film therefore must not spoon-feed the viewer with clear messages; but stimulate him to think with kind of prolegomena: appropriately moving but incomplete inputs for thought.

In this sense, the Hollywood style of film-making, which sets out to tell an unambiguous story but in an emotionally absorbing manner -- by manipulating the viewer’s emotions (with, for example, the sound track which says, in fact: “now feel sad”, “now feel scared”) is, in Khiarostami’s words, “an act of theft in the dark” – quite literally in the dark, of course. It deprives the viewer of his intellect. It denies him the opportunity to think and interpret.

There is no such thing, says Khiarostami, as understanding art; there is only a number of different possible reflections about it. To illustrate the point, he recalls having once seen a Swedish film, of the dialogue of which he understood nothing. Yet he liked the film so much that he went right back to the ticket window, bought another ticket and saw the film all over again: he had been deeply moved by the interpretation he had invented for the film. Later he had found the film’s script and discovered that the plot was not quite what he had imagined it to be and that he had liked his own version much better.

It is this mechanism that he wishes to stimulate in the viewers of his films. He does it well.

Yet, there appears to exist a limit to the amount of ambiguity art can take before it becomes downright silly. The prescription to success appears a well-crafted kind of ambiguity, one susceptible to numerous but well founded and interesting interpretations. The next step in this research must be a better understanding of just how ambiguous ambiguity should be on the one hand and can be on the other.

Feb 4, 2009

Trollope, freedom, and happiness

An older American man, a voracious reader of literature and the classics, wrote me forcefully and with conviction, about the evils of Anthony Trollope. The fellow, he said, wrote prescriptively and hated young women. I wrote back that I liked Trollope and never saw any much hate in him; that, in fact and au contraire, he seemed to me quite ironic and detached from his novels, their Victorian pattern, his heroines, and their moral and otherwise travails, regarding them all with a measured, sympathetic but unserious eye. The American then wrote back to confess that such had been his impression also until – he entered into an online discussion with some (no doubt American liberated female) readers (almost certainly aspiring academics). That, he said, opened his eyes to the truth. It also worked up his bile.

It surprised me to see that he of all people should choose to borrow the opinion of others regarding literature. What is the point of reading 2000 pages a week and being one of the most well-read men around, if one is unable to form his own opinion afterwards but ends up toeing some party line in the end?

It is interesting, incidentally, how many angry young women there are these days around the academia in the West: angry on account of being unfairly oppressed by the chauvinist males. Now, that young academics feel oppressed is not surprising: the field is crowded with talent and the rewards are meager, meaning that in terms of blood per dollar, the academia probably fights the toughest, most difficult and yet, financially speaking, the least rewarding corporate battles out there; every academic is bound to be a highly strung person. Given such circumstances, that women academics should turn to womenslib theory as a competitive weapon (something with which to beat the males) is not surprising; and that they should use it to stoke their own ambition (by feeding their internal rage), is understandable; but that they are as a result a knot of seething anger and bristling aggression is unfortunate.

Zobenigo has slept or has had close dealings with several such aspiring female academicians and has since learned to avoid the kind altogether: there was altogether too much confrontation, too much tension, too much unhappiness. Zobenigo prefers easy human company; or else – none at all.

In the less liberated parts of the world – Thailand, Morocco – where no doubt women are less liberated and (perhaps) more oppressed, there is less anger; women seem both happier and more pleasant company. There is a paradox here: one wonders: what is the point of liberation when it appears to breed more unhappiness and dissatisfaction?

Perhaps someone might say to this, oh, happiness is unimportant; what is important is freedom. In other words, the unfree must be set free even if it cost them a measure of happiness.

I am not sure whether I am sufficiently enlightened to understand this line of thinking.

Feb 3, 2009

Modernity

"Modern living in Chiang Mai", said the copy. That’s all it said. "Modern living in Chiang Mai".

It puzzled me.

The ad was for one of those overpriced, overcrowded, aesthetically indifferent development projects in the near suburbs. Since it could sell neither affordability; nor natural beauty; nor peace and quiet, it proposed to sell – like many projects who have nothing of value to offer – modernity: modernity as a break with the stuffy old past, modernity as an aspiration.

Yet, no one really has any notion what modernity is supposed to consists in. It seems to be something we make up as we go along. Which is why I was puzzled by the ad: I didn't know what it meant. Perchance it meant nothing?

Of course, I realized, this amorphousness made the term perfectly handy for bullshit art: since anything could be called modern, anything usually is. The term's appeal to bullshit artists then is clear.

Its more baffling aspect is its appeal to those upon whom the bullshit artists prey; that is, those who buy into schemes labeled as "modern": the meaninglessness of the term does not appear to deter anyone from wanting to pursue it, to be modern, whatever that may be.

But then, perhaps this precisely is the term's appeal: that no one knows what it means? An amorphous principle is convenient: devoid of clear rules, isn't likely to impose upon us any onerous ones (which could be inconvenient). A modern person -- one living by the lights of modernity -- is free to violate the rules of the past in the name of modernity but isn't obliged by any new rules in their place.

In short, modernity is nothing and -- this is precisely its appeal.

Feb 2, 2009

Raoul Ruiz

In French cinema my biggest discovery has been Raoul Ruiz, a Chilean émigré who stopped filming in 1967, at emigration, and then resumed again in 1996; I have only seen two of his recent films so far, The Genealogies of Crime and Ce Jour-la, but they have made me hunger to see more (Klimt and Le Temps Retrouve, a rendition of Proust). Both the films which I have seen had been shot in exquisite, lavish interiors of beautiful villas; with stunning, acrobatic camera-work which distracts the viewer away from the action towards the incredible interior decoration; camera-work which is beautiful and often weird – steep angles looking up staircases or up from the floor; camera swinging back and forth rotating 180 degrees through the ceiling while going from one interlocutor to the next; reflections in mirrors, two way mirrors, reflecting pools, shots through empty glasses and full fish tanks; background shadows distorted by moving lights foreshadowing future events. The plots are extremely odd (in a Borges kind of way), hard to follow, intentionally confused in a myriad little ways (some are there clearly for no other reason than to sew further confusion: for example, a certain person, called by everybody ‘Monsieur George’ keeps correcting them that his name really is ‘Didier, Georges Didier’, but if you freeze the frame to look at his business card you see that his name is ‘Didier Georges’, etc.); some multiple roles are played by a single actor; and the heroes play psychoanalytical games in which they switch places (I-am-you-and-you-are-me) adding further confusion. The dialogue is often inscrutable, practically Bretonian. The final resolution appears to wash over one at the end, a bit like a Faulknerian sentence, in a not-quite revelation: you end up with the feeling that you get it, kind of, almost. Or – do you? It’s really quite wonderful in a reassemble-an-ancient-text-from-a pile-of-broken-cuneiform-tablets sort of way; like exploring an ancient rediscovered subterranean funeral maze of a lost and forgotten civilization. The genealogies of crime I watched through once and then immediately pressed the play button to watch it all over again, this time taking frequent pauses to inspect particular shots.

It could be compared to the better films of Peter Greenaway (The draftsman’s contract, The Cook, the thief, his wife and her lover), except that it is far brainier, far more intelligent.

Feb 1, 2009

Periodicity

Picasso, I am told, worked in periods. So do I: several years back I was seized by textiles; I read every book on textiles I could lay my hands on; visited every museum and every private collection; spent countless hours looking through reams of cloth in shops and warehouses. The ‘period’ culminated in two extended driving trips, one in India and one in Thailand, going from one weaving center to the next to see the work and to buy samples, sometimes still on the loom. Perhaps the greatest fun was driving through villages with the window down and listening for the clack-clack of the loom, then following it to find the solitary weaver weaving under the house, a few strokes at a time in between cooking rice and seeing to her children; and barging in on her to see the work.

Then there was the Iznik tile period, which took me to Istanbul and Iznik and London and Lisbon; the South East Asian dance-drama period which took me to Bali, Bangkok and Java on numerous occasions over three consecutive years; the Italian painting period before it, with repeat visits to both Italy and all sorts of museums all over the world; and the Baroque opera period before that, during which I crisscrossed the Atlantic chasing rare performances of obscure works, spent hours in audio-libraries and acquired a vast collection of records. And always read, read, read.

Now I am discovering cinema, an art which I have always ignored. Good films had seemed so far in between; now I know that they were simply hard to find, a problem thoughtfully solved for me by a local video store entrepreneur. So, I have been watching films, three, sometimes four, a day.

There appear to be many branches of art which I have not yet discovered: enough to keep me busy next thirty or forty years.

(But how do I square my misanthropic insistence that my happiness must be self-sufficient with the fact that so many of my pleasures are man-made?)