They said on the radio this morning that 70% of the universe is made up of dark matter. Pretty much all that we know about it is that it's the stuff that pulls the universe into explansion.
I know I'm extrapolating directly from physics into metaphor here, but this just seems somehow significant:
1. Most of the world we think we know is made up of stuff we don't know anything about, and aren't even aware is there. We are, so to speak, completely in the dark about what's really going on.
2. It's the dark stuff that forces us to expand. Not the light, but the dark.
Both seem as true on the personal level as they are on the physical.
I like them because they help to reclaim the importance of darkness, and sever the link we have made between darkness and evil, negativity and death.
In the Far East white, not black, is the colour of death. Funeral corteges consist of mourners clad in bright white, colour of bones and loneliness. Someone once said white was the colour that he associated with "lost". Like the white fog in which you lose your way, or the over-brilliant, blinding glare of snow.
Dark is the place where the seeds lie buried in winter, until by the grace of that period of apparently endless dormancy, they invisibly begin to germinate, sensing the light and warmth they can now move toward. If they get to the light too early it can be dangerous--they can grow spindly, or be too shallow rooted to withstand strong sun. In the desert of New Mexico the native farmers plant the corn DEEP.
The dark is difficult. Or at least, the cold dark is. As winter fills the evening with frozen ink, I light candles and think of the soft, welcoming dark of tropical and Mediterranean nights, with the little lights strung out between the looming shadows of acacia trees, and the soft songs of crickets rasping in the background.
Friday, November 17, 2006
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
progress
It occurred to me this week that in the old days, when things did not change so fast and there weren't so many people, and so there was not the same need for endless development, you could stand on a piece of land in mid-life, on which you had stood as a kid, and on which you have stood every day since then, and look out, and it would be the same.
And that permanence in the LAND would have given you a different view of life. A view of life in which cycles of seasonal change went on, but basically the world endured. And I think this permanence would have been a comfort.
Now I go to the places that I loved and took solace and strength from when I was younger, and they have been touristified and pathed over, with explanatory plaques and souvenir vendors, or they have been razed and built on.
The LAND is disappearing. The world population has DOUBLED since I was born, and I feel this nostalgia for the passing of calm and silence and small-scale life, and for a time when things did not require continual adjustment at such a pace.
Some things are good as they are, they function well and do not need to be replaced or improved. It's a relief to find things as they were, unchanged, old friends softened by time and use.
I long for respite from the continual murder of the simple and quiet. I scour around in my mind for where peace and permanence might be found, but there are people and buildings and roads everywhere that I know now, and I feel a panic at the thought of the 3B more who will arrive by the time I am 80, tripling the population since the 3B it was when I was born.
Already all the bustle overwhelms me. Moving somewhere unspoiled simply invites a repitition of that experience of seeing the houses begin to sprawl over it. There is no solution, no grace to be found.
And that permanence in the LAND would have given you a different view of life. A view of life in which cycles of seasonal change went on, but basically the world endured. And I think this permanence would have been a comfort.
Now I go to the places that I loved and took solace and strength from when I was younger, and they have been touristified and pathed over, with explanatory plaques and souvenir vendors, or they have been razed and built on.
The LAND is disappearing. The world population has DOUBLED since I was born, and I feel this nostalgia for the passing of calm and silence and small-scale life, and for a time when things did not require continual adjustment at such a pace.
Some things are good as they are, they function well and do not need to be replaced or improved. It's a relief to find things as they were, unchanged, old friends softened by time and use.
I long for respite from the continual murder of the simple and quiet. I scour around in my mind for where peace and permanence might be found, but there are people and buildings and roads everywhere that I know now, and I feel a panic at the thought of the 3B more who will arrive by the time I am 80, tripling the population since the 3B it was when I was born.
Already all the bustle overwhelms me. Moving somewhere unspoiled simply invites a repitition of that experience of seeing the houses begin to sprawl over it. There is no solution, no grace to be found.
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
vertigo
Many have tried to write about the Mediterranean, but few have succeeded.There's a melancholy about this old coast and these islands, like a base note of musk in a perfume that would otherwise be too sweet to bear. Is it the bitter ghosts of all those dead empires? Or was there always a sting in the honey? A thorn in the lion's paw? (For there were lions here, once). Perhaps it's the daemon of this land itself that inspired the Greeks to tragedy and sent first the Alexandrians, and then the Romans, out to conquer the known world.
The impossibly clear water is alive with tiny fishes. Intoxicated, you dive down deeper and deeper, until the current of your passing billows the sand, half-revealing ancient mosaic. The fish flash silver, and your blue-and-white mood shifts to slanting vertigo at the depths of time concealed here.
The veil slips. The beautiful olive-skinned dancing boy becomes an old man wasted by years. But within the grotto of his eyes glows the same fire that blooms in the blood-red geraniums and the crow-black cypresses down by the port, where men have been fishing for millenia.
The jasmine-scented afternoon smells like heaven, the evening air is delicious, and in the soft night everyone's eyes are olive-black and filled with the slow smile of love. The magic is irresistible, like a flower to a fly, and in you slip, reveling in bright yellow.
Saturday, July 08, 2006
war crimes in Iraq
TIKRIT, Iraq - U.S. investigators have asked Iraqi authorities to help them navigate cultural sensitivities to exhume the body of a teenager allegedly raped and murdered with her family by American soldiers, a military official said Saturday.
Full story at http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060708/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_rape_investigation
Incredible. The level of disrespect in this is extraordinary. I am not Muslim but my reaction was, for god's sake, they have to violate her all over again now she's dead? And always with the ideology of justice.
The soldier charged with the rape received an honourable discharge on the basis of personality disorder. Which of course suggests a failed attempt at a cover-up. But question of responsibility has to go much, much further than an investigation of this man's individual acts. And do read on, because the point of this post is not to vilify this man for what he did.
There's something wierd about the army righteously going after soldiers for committing atrocities. By allowing ourselves to get pulled into despising these men personally, on the basis of their individual 'disgustingness', we permit the continuation of the ridiculous ideology that the "normal" war in Iraq has proceeded, and continues to proceed, in a civilised manner. That, with the exception of this unpleasant character, who has now been removed from the game, the war is just, fair and clean.
Whereas the unpalatable truth is that these young war criminals are behaving in ways that are coherent with the situation they are living in. If they put me through what they put these young men through, prostituting their courage and their loyalty for the profit of the ruling oligarchy, I would also be a perverse remnant of myself. And that's a fact, actually, according to a study cited by James Hillman in his astounding book A TERRIBLE LOVE OF WAR:
"A world war 2 study determined that after sixty days of continuous combat, 98 % of all surviving soldiers will have become psychiatric casualties.....[A] common trait among the 2 % able to endure....was a predisposition toward 'aggressive psychopathic personalities'."
NINETY-EIGHT PERCENT. In other words, if you aren't psycho already, two months of combat will drive you nuts. Or put the other way around: two months of combat drives every single person nuts, unless they already are a psychopath.
Then, having driven you nuts, the army personalises it, saying you have a disorder, or are a war criminal. I'm not letting this particular rapist-and-murderer off the hook here (he sounds like one of the 2%), but I am asking us to consider where the blame really lies for his disorder and his war crime, as well as his opportunity. He and thousands like him, along with hundreds of thousands of civilians, are being physically and psychologically violated and maimed in and by the war.
According to a friend of mine who worked recently at the VA, after all the research based on the Vietnam Vets, the army is still just dumping the soldiers back into society exactly the same way. We will be reaping the harvest until well after I die. Hopefully peacefully, in a bed.
We must not be taken in by the ideologies of freedom, democracy and a just war. If anything needs to be exhumed, it is the truth of violent colonisation that lies beneath these shiny white words.
Full story at http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060708/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_rape_investigation
Incredible. The level of disrespect in this is extraordinary. I am not Muslim but my reaction was, for god's sake, they have to violate her all over again now she's dead? And always with the ideology of justice.
The soldier charged with the rape received an honourable discharge on the basis of personality disorder. Which of course suggests a failed attempt at a cover-up. But question of responsibility has to go much, much further than an investigation of this man's individual acts. And do read on, because the point of this post is not to vilify this man for what he did.
There's something wierd about the army righteously going after soldiers for committing atrocities. By allowing ourselves to get pulled into despising these men personally, on the basis of their individual 'disgustingness', we permit the continuation of the ridiculous ideology that the "normal" war in Iraq has proceeded, and continues to proceed, in a civilised manner. That, with the exception of this unpleasant character, who has now been removed from the game, the war is just, fair and clean.
Whereas the unpalatable truth is that these young war criminals are behaving in ways that are coherent with the situation they are living in. If they put me through what they put these young men through, prostituting their courage and their loyalty for the profit of the ruling oligarchy, I would also be a perverse remnant of myself. And that's a fact, actually, according to a study cited by James Hillman in his astounding book A TERRIBLE LOVE OF WAR:
"A world war 2 study determined that after sixty days of continuous combat, 98 % of all surviving soldiers will have become psychiatric casualties.....[A] common trait among the 2 % able to endure....was a predisposition toward 'aggressive psychopathic personalities'."
NINETY-EIGHT PERCENT. In other words, if you aren't psycho already, two months of combat will drive you nuts. Or put the other way around: two months of combat drives every single person nuts, unless they already are a psychopath.
Then, having driven you nuts, the army personalises it, saying you have a disorder, or are a war criminal. I'm not letting this particular rapist-and-murderer off the hook here (he sounds like one of the 2%), but I am asking us to consider where the blame really lies for his disorder and his war crime, as well as his opportunity. He and thousands like him, along with hundreds of thousands of civilians, are being physically and psychologically violated and maimed in and by the war.
According to a friend of mine who worked recently at the VA, after all the research based on the Vietnam Vets, the army is still just dumping the soldiers back into society exactly the same way. We will be reaping the harvest until well after I die. Hopefully peacefully, in a bed.
We must not be taken in by the ideologies of freedom, democracy and a just war. If anything needs to be exhumed, it is the truth of violent colonisation that lies beneath these shiny white words.
Thursday, May 25, 2006
the world outside
I left Palo Alto yesterday afternoon, and as I drove out to 280 I was struck by The World Outside. The brightness of the sun, the brilliance of the blue sky, the flashing effect of the wind in Eucalyptus trees. It seemed, well...outsized. And a little overwhelming, like something you've been looking at for a long time, suddenly seen through 3D glasses.
It's easy to lose touch with the The World Outside when you're working in an office. You get inured to your little paths between your desk, the lab, the printer, and the secret coffee machine squirreled away in that code-protected area. And it occurs to me that this is the NUMBER ONE PROBLEM: the fact that we lose touch with The World Outside, that we forget the warm embrace of the air, the scent of the summer breeze, the softness of the rain, the whisper of trees in the wind.
It's not surprising that CEOs and top execs have no relationship with nature or respect for biodiversity. They never really meet either, except perhaps obliquely on a hunting trip laid on by a client, and that hardly counts. They are the nearest thing you can find outside of a fifties sci-fi movie to brains in jars, fed by an automatic feed of pre-digested nutrients.
How can we expect them to have any idea what a forest is like when it's just dusk and you can feel it breathing? How can we blame them for not understanding that manipulating transactions of profit and loss is the least of all human activities? How can we hate them for not seeing the world as more than a sink for effluent they never smell, see or touch? It's literally all numbers and concepts to them. They speed past it on their way to other things; things that exist in their minds and on their balance sheets. Things that exist ONLY in their minds and on their balance sheets. Who ever saw a share price build a nest and lay eggs? Who can lay total customer satisfaction on a plate and watch hungry people eat it?
While I was pondering all this I drove to my meeting. It seems to be consolidation time again inside the company I'm working for. It's not too far along yet, but I can scent change coming, like rain in the fall. And it gets me going. The blood starts zinging in my veins, my heart beats a little faster. I start thinking strategically, I churn out ideas. It's not excitement that generates this; it's a mixture of fear and competitive spirit. If you even have a little competitive spirit, the scent of danger can drive your adrenalin sky-high as you start to accelerate to make sure you get ahead of the team before the wolves are let loose.
After the meeting I left to drive back through the same glorious country, with the blond grass glowing in the late afternoon sun, and the smooth hills curving green to the horizon. And once again I had to struggle to see it. I was too speeded up, too hyped on paranoia and determination to survive. I was full of plans for how to feather my nest in this abstract world of contingency plans that have nothing to do with anything I could actually weigh in my hands, or plant in the earth, or gaze at with eyes that well up at its beauty.
Is it any wonder The World Outside is in such grave danger when our minds are so full of the immaterial? When even I, with my deep ecology agenda and concern for the world, struggle to see it through the film of figures that runs up and down over the inside of my eyes like the titles for The Matrix?
It's easy to lose touch with the The World Outside when you're working in an office. You get inured to your little paths between your desk, the lab, the printer, and the secret coffee machine squirreled away in that code-protected area. And it occurs to me that this is the NUMBER ONE PROBLEM: the fact that we lose touch with The World Outside, that we forget the warm embrace of the air, the scent of the summer breeze, the softness of the rain, the whisper of trees in the wind.
It's not surprising that CEOs and top execs have no relationship with nature or respect for biodiversity. They never really meet either, except perhaps obliquely on a hunting trip laid on by a client, and that hardly counts. They are the nearest thing you can find outside of a fifties sci-fi movie to brains in jars, fed by an automatic feed of pre-digested nutrients.
How can we expect them to have any idea what a forest is like when it's just dusk and you can feel it breathing? How can we blame them for not understanding that manipulating transactions of profit and loss is the least of all human activities? How can we hate them for not seeing the world as more than a sink for effluent they never smell, see or touch? It's literally all numbers and concepts to them. They speed past it on their way to other things; things that exist in their minds and on their balance sheets. Things that exist ONLY in their minds and on their balance sheets. Who ever saw a share price build a nest and lay eggs? Who can lay total customer satisfaction on a plate and watch hungry people eat it?
While I was pondering all this I drove to my meeting. It seems to be consolidation time again inside the company I'm working for. It's not too far along yet, but I can scent change coming, like rain in the fall. And it gets me going. The blood starts zinging in my veins, my heart beats a little faster. I start thinking strategically, I churn out ideas. It's not excitement that generates this; it's a mixture of fear and competitive spirit. If you even have a little competitive spirit, the scent of danger can drive your adrenalin sky-high as you start to accelerate to make sure you get ahead of the team before the wolves are let loose.
After the meeting I left to drive back through the same glorious country, with the blond grass glowing in the late afternoon sun, and the smooth hills curving green to the horizon. And once again I had to struggle to see it. I was too speeded up, too hyped on paranoia and determination to survive. I was full of plans for how to feather my nest in this abstract world of contingency plans that have nothing to do with anything I could actually weigh in my hands, or plant in the earth, or gaze at with eyes that well up at its beauty.
Is it any wonder The World Outside is in such grave danger when our minds are so full of the immaterial? When even I, with my deep ecology agenda and concern for the world, struggle to see it through the film of figures that runs up and down over the inside of my eyes like the titles for The Matrix?
Monday, May 22, 2006
gulab jamun
I've lived most of my life in other people's countries. I was born in a Confucian culture to ex-pat British parents (one Welsh, one English), and apparently learned Chinese before English. I started primary school in a Protestant country and moved a couple of years later to a Mediterranean culture where I was fascinated with little street-side shrines to the Virgin Mary. At nineteen I went to University in Scotland and moved pretty soon after graduation to France. Now I'm a resident alien living in the US.
Given all of this, in some ways diversity is my specialised subject. I have never really felt particularly British. Having friends all over the world makes you pretty unfit for patriotic pride, basically because you realise that everyone is just as important as you. Learning to speak French changed the self inside of me, and permanently altered the way I interact with the world.
Living in South East Asia as a teenager gave me a different locus of importance in the world. You may know this feeling if you've spent a lot of time somewhere else; the centre is no longer London or New York, but Hong Kong, Japan, Jakarta. It FEELS different when you look at a world map.
But recently I've noticed something more: a deepening of that feeling of cultural relativity, of that geographical off-centering. I don't know whether it's the result or the cause of this deepening, but I'm increasingly glimpsing a different centre...as though the focus of the world, and the important areas in it, were shifting eastwards.
In Large IT Company, Inc., where I work, most of our young engineers are Chinese and Indian. And for good reason. Recently the US National Academies of Science and Engineering, and the US Institute of Medecine, published a report called 'The Gathering Storm', in which they warned that the US lags far behind other countries in science education. Personally I have noticed, based on meeting kids in developing countries as varied as Senegal and Vietnam, that we also lag in terms of our motivation for educational achievement. We can't get our disillusioned kids to finish school; their kids seem sharp as tacks, learn everything they can and are clamouring for more. At seven the Vietnamese street kids read and write, and insist on conversing with you via a phrase book. Little kids in Senegal have to be VIVID to survive, and their twenty-somethings are dying for opportunties to use their talents in the world.
The African CIO of a large defense company recently told me that he had noticed a significant change in West Africa. The Chinese, he said, have moved in. And, he said, their attitude was completely different from that of Western partners. For a start, they built stuff that was actually useful; that is, for more than simply money laundering via pseudo-aid. Such as hospitals. And secondly, they moved their people there, to live in the area and integrate. He said it looked like real investment.
I thought it sounded as though he also meant investment by people who, though different, act as though you're both equal. And I thought, woooo, this changes everything. Because the Chinese can contribute to Africa without the legacy of colonialism. (By which I mean both a culture of superiority, and trade restrictions built to continue the fleecing of the Third World that we began four centuries or so ago.) And I felt a little excited, because perhaps we don't have to work through all that colonial shit anymore if some other people can just come along and side step it. Then us Whities will be out of the game. Someone else will bring a ball, and everyone will go and play with them instead. And the joke will, for once, finally, after all these hundreds of years, be on us.
While I had this on my mind, I noticed an interaction in the coffee-corner at work, while I was sharing some gulab jamun with some Indian colleagues. An Iranian engineer wandered by and was offered some of the delicious syrupy treats, and there followed a conversation during which it was pointed out to me that gulab jamun came to India by way of Persia. And I had a little moment of realising, in a visceral way, that the Rest Of The World has a life of its very own.
The shock was not that I realised this. It was that I realised it in a new way. I realised it, not in a way related to the past, but in a way related to the future. I realised it in my body, as though I lived a dozen time zones to the east. And as we laughed, I got that the West is done. We don't realise it yet, but the sun has set here. The future is in the Rest Of The World. It's in China and India (and probably South America, given the recent revolts there against US hegemony).
I'm nervous about this economically, since my savings are partly in dollars and partly in Euros, and I worry about my old age in a dead empire. But I'm also excited about it. Will the end of colonialism happen in my time? Whatever happens to me and my small life, I look forward to whatever small role I can play in a world in which the tired old horse of the British empire, and its nasty starred and striped nephew, are finally put out to grass.
Given all of this, in some ways diversity is my specialised subject. I have never really felt particularly British. Having friends all over the world makes you pretty unfit for patriotic pride, basically because you realise that everyone is just as important as you. Learning to speak French changed the self inside of me, and permanently altered the way I interact with the world.
Living in South East Asia as a teenager gave me a different locus of importance in the world. You may know this feeling if you've spent a lot of time somewhere else; the centre is no longer London or New York, but Hong Kong, Japan, Jakarta. It FEELS different when you look at a world map.
But recently I've noticed something more: a deepening of that feeling of cultural relativity, of that geographical off-centering. I don't know whether it's the result or the cause of this deepening, but I'm increasingly glimpsing a different centre...as though the focus of the world, and the important areas in it, were shifting eastwards.
In Large IT Company, Inc., where I work, most of our young engineers are Chinese and Indian. And for good reason. Recently the US National Academies of Science and Engineering, and the US Institute of Medecine, published a report called 'The Gathering Storm', in which they warned that the US lags far behind other countries in science education. Personally I have noticed, based on meeting kids in developing countries as varied as Senegal and Vietnam, that we also lag in terms of our motivation for educational achievement. We can't get our disillusioned kids to finish school; their kids seem sharp as tacks, learn everything they can and are clamouring for more. At seven the Vietnamese street kids read and write, and insist on conversing with you via a phrase book. Little kids in Senegal have to be VIVID to survive, and their twenty-somethings are dying for opportunties to use their talents in the world.
The African CIO of a large defense company recently told me that he had noticed a significant change in West Africa. The Chinese, he said, have moved in. And, he said, their attitude was completely different from that of Western partners. For a start, they built stuff that was actually useful; that is, for more than simply money laundering via pseudo-aid. Such as hospitals. And secondly, they moved their people there, to live in the area and integrate. He said it looked like real investment.
I thought it sounded as though he also meant investment by people who, though different, act as though you're both equal. And I thought, woooo, this changes everything. Because the Chinese can contribute to Africa without the legacy of colonialism. (By which I mean both a culture of superiority, and trade restrictions built to continue the fleecing of the Third World that we began four centuries or so ago.) And I felt a little excited, because perhaps we don't have to work through all that colonial shit anymore if some other people can just come along and side step it. Then us Whities will be out of the game. Someone else will bring a ball, and everyone will go and play with them instead. And the joke will, for once, finally, after all these hundreds of years, be on us.
While I had this on my mind, I noticed an interaction in the coffee-corner at work, while I was sharing some gulab jamun with some Indian colleagues. An Iranian engineer wandered by and was offered some of the delicious syrupy treats, and there followed a conversation during which it was pointed out to me that gulab jamun came to India by way of Persia. And I had a little moment of realising, in a visceral way, that the Rest Of The World has a life of its very own.
The shock was not that I realised this. It was that I realised it in a new way. I realised it, not in a way related to the past, but in a way related to the future. I realised it in my body, as though I lived a dozen time zones to the east. And as we laughed, I got that the West is done. We don't realise it yet, but the sun has set here. The future is in the Rest Of The World. It's in China and India (and probably South America, given the recent revolts there against US hegemony).
I'm nervous about this economically, since my savings are partly in dollars and partly in Euros, and I worry about my old age in a dead empire. But I'm also excited about it. Will the end of colonialism happen in my time? Whatever happens to me and my small life, I look forward to whatever small role I can play in a world in which the tired old horse of the British empire, and its nasty starred and striped nephew, are finally put out to grass.
Thursday, May 18, 2006
final rant about dating
It seems terribly francaise of me to hate something linguistic with such venom, but I loathe the verb to date, as in "I'd like to date you".
I despise its blunt and mechanistic transitivity. Subject, verb, object: I, Date, You. It shocks me. Worse than that; it repells me.
Prior to coming to America, I had always used the phrase to go out with. "She's going out with him" seems to me to be about as far from "She's dating him" as "She's making love with him" is from "She's doing him".
She's making love with him allows so much more openness, gentleness, nuance and mutuality. In She's doing him the action is stripped to the most basic common denominator, in which one person operates upon another, almost irrespective of that person's own subjectivity. In this phrase, and in the mindset represented by this phrase, the other exists merely as a target for the activity of the subject. There's no I/Thou there; it's strictly I/it. And what's worse, it's I/it in denial.
It's more subtly the same with He's dating her. HE's dating HER. What's she doing? Well, in this sentence construction, not much. She's reduced to being the object of his activity of dating. She's not going out with him. They're not seeing each other. He's dating her. (Ditto by the way, with She's dating him. I'm not talking about gender roles here, I'm talking about ways of viewing the opposite sex as an instrument for one's own agenda of self-gratification.)
As I said, it seems very French intello of me to be so concerned with the deep structural psychology underlying a banal piece of surface syntax, but I truly think that the transitivity of this verb phrase reveals what is so unhealthy about the whole relationship scene here in Silicon Valley, in which it is quite normal to date multiple people, compare them on a kind of mental spreadsheet (for all I know people use real ones), and then pick the "best" contender.
You can buy tickets to expensive 'speed dating' soirees, during which you rotate through people in slots of six minutes each, and ask those with the best personal PR for their numbers. You can subscribe to online dating services, some of which (such as eHarmony) have already decided for you that if you're a woman, you need an older man (on the basis, they claim, of research). Women apparently sort men by height and income. So, if you're a short nice guy with a low paid job, kiss your subscription goodbye. I don't know what the men sort for, but I do know the woman post glamour shots.
All of this exhausts me on the deepest of levels. I'd rather stay single than enter this world, with its loaded agenda and its instrumentalist goals.
How have we have allowed ourselves to become so commercialised that every exchange has become one of profit and loss? In a society in which everyone continually looks for the biggest return on the least possible investment, every interaction becomes an advertisment, every meeting an interview.
I despise its blunt and mechanistic transitivity. Subject, verb, object: I, Date, You. It shocks me. Worse than that; it repells me.
Prior to coming to America, I had always used the phrase to go out with. "She's going out with him" seems to me to be about as far from "She's dating him" as "She's making love with him" is from "She's doing him".
She's making love with him allows so much more openness, gentleness, nuance and mutuality. In She's doing him the action is stripped to the most basic common denominator, in which one person operates upon another, almost irrespective of that person's own subjectivity. In this phrase, and in the mindset represented by this phrase, the other exists merely as a target for the activity of the subject. There's no I/Thou there; it's strictly I/it. And what's worse, it's I/it in denial.
It's more subtly the same with He's dating her. HE's dating HER. What's she doing? Well, in this sentence construction, not much. She's reduced to being the object of his activity of dating. She's not going out with him. They're not seeing each other. He's dating her. (Ditto by the way, with She's dating him. I'm not talking about gender roles here, I'm talking about ways of viewing the opposite sex as an instrument for one's own agenda of self-gratification.)
As I said, it seems very French intello of me to be so concerned with the deep structural psychology underlying a banal piece of surface syntax, but I truly think that the transitivity of this verb phrase reveals what is so unhealthy about the whole relationship scene here in Silicon Valley, in which it is quite normal to date multiple people, compare them on a kind of mental spreadsheet (for all I know people use real ones), and then pick the "best" contender.
You can buy tickets to expensive 'speed dating' soirees, during which you rotate through people in slots of six minutes each, and ask those with the best personal PR for their numbers. You can subscribe to online dating services, some of which (such as eHarmony) have already decided for you that if you're a woman, you need an older man (on the basis, they claim, of research). Women apparently sort men by height and income. So, if you're a short nice guy with a low paid job, kiss your subscription goodbye. I don't know what the men sort for, but I do know the woman post glamour shots.
All of this exhausts me on the deepest of levels. I'd rather stay single than enter this world, with its loaded agenda and its instrumentalist goals.
How have we have allowed ourselves to become so commercialised that every exchange has become one of profit and loss? In a society in which everyone continually looks for the biggest return on the least possible investment, every interaction becomes an advertisment, every meeting an interview.
Monday, March 27, 2006
indigenous? not for millenia
I keep coming across training courses that promise, "During this week, we will rediscover our indigenous heart". Or some such other variant of this promise. "We'll rediscover our indigenous heart." What?
These statements about our "inner indigenous nature" are generally accompanied by glowing testimonials from people who describe themselves as "I've traced my roots. I'm Celtic, German, Spanish, Greek and Irish", or, "I've discovered I'm Swedish, Italian, French, Czech and English". What on earth are these laundry lists of the nationality of their ancestors supposed to signify?
It seems to me to be an insult and a belittlement of indigenous people to assume that a one week course, or even a two year course, or even a ten year one for that matter, can enable people who have not been indigenous for MILLENIA to "rediscover" anything about themselves which is indigenous. Indigenous culture is not some bundle of practices one can learn from reading a book or two about spirit medecine, or by invoking some set of diverse ancestors in dubious ceremonies involving the burning of sage, or even by completing an MA in anthropology.
You can go back through your family tree and discover that you have people in it from Spain, England, Germany, Greece etc. But what does that mean? It certainly doesn't take you back to anything indigenous. Indigenous means local to the land, linked to the land, of the land (a good clue is whether a people practise an hunter-gatherer lifestyle, with shamanistic medecine and religion). None of these cultures is indigenous. These are cultures of empire!
Practically no-one in Europe, unless they are from the far flung Northern regions of Finland, or perhaps some of the very rural areas of ex-USSR, has been indigenous within several thousand years. The Celts, the Greeks, the Romans, the Huns, the Goths, the Vikings, the Saxons, the Gauls, the Normans, and countless others dealt with the indigenous in Europe from before the time of Christ. Some small pockets remain, for example in Lappland. But basically most of Europe has not been populated by its indigenous people for a v-e-r-y long time.
I for example will never be able to become indigenous--even I spent the next 20 years learning to live on the land, to listen to its spirits and creatures, and imitating the practises of some real natives, I would never be able to unlearn the habits of the non-indigenous cultures I have been part of. I can never BE the way I would be had I been brought up within an indigenous culture. It's not about what you DO.
I read somewhere that ferrets will not go feral--they have been domesticated too long. You can release them into the wild (they tried it in Australia to keep the rabbits down) but they will not go back to the land and turn feral. Well it's the same for humans. My Welsh family has been traced back to 1066 and there's not an indigenous soul in there. I am not going to belittle the milennia of culture, knowledge, study, wisdom and invention of the truly indigenous by claiming that I can "reclaim" all that for myself.
The indigenous are on the verge of extinction in this world, and appropriating them culturally is part of the process of devaluing their real existence so that it can be recuperated by the mainstream, and so that they can be rendered extinct without hitch--after all, we're all indigenous, aren't we? So they weren't that special after all. Nor was their ancestral habitat. Bye. Resist this crap, people. Rediscover your dignity, and your right to live on and with the earth. Support the fight of the indigenous for the right to life for themselves and their land. But don't steal their identity as well as their birthright. Don't claim to be indigenous if you are not.
These statements about our "inner indigenous nature" are generally accompanied by glowing testimonials from people who describe themselves as "I've traced my roots. I'm Celtic, German, Spanish, Greek and Irish", or, "I've discovered I'm Swedish, Italian, French, Czech and English". What on earth are these laundry lists of the nationality of their ancestors supposed to signify?
It seems to me to be an insult and a belittlement of indigenous people to assume that a one week course, or even a two year course, or even a ten year one for that matter, can enable people who have not been indigenous for MILLENIA to "rediscover" anything about themselves which is indigenous. Indigenous culture is not some bundle of practices one can learn from reading a book or two about spirit medecine, or by invoking some set of diverse ancestors in dubious ceremonies involving the burning of sage, or even by completing an MA in anthropology.
You can go back through your family tree and discover that you have people in it from Spain, England, Germany, Greece etc. But what does that mean? It certainly doesn't take you back to anything indigenous. Indigenous means local to the land, linked to the land, of the land (a good clue is whether a people practise an hunter-gatherer lifestyle, with shamanistic medecine and religion). None of these cultures is indigenous. These are cultures of empire!
Practically no-one in Europe, unless they are from the far flung Northern regions of Finland, or perhaps some of the very rural areas of ex-USSR, has been indigenous within several thousand years. The Celts, the Greeks, the Romans, the Huns, the Goths, the Vikings, the Saxons, the Gauls, the Normans, and countless others dealt with the indigenous in Europe from before the time of Christ. Some small pockets remain, for example in Lappland. But basically most of Europe has not been populated by its indigenous people for a v-e-r-y long time.
I for example will never be able to become indigenous--even I spent the next 20 years learning to live on the land, to listen to its spirits and creatures, and imitating the practises of some real natives, I would never be able to unlearn the habits of the non-indigenous cultures I have been part of. I can never BE the way I would be had I been brought up within an indigenous culture. It's not about what you DO.
I read somewhere that ferrets will not go feral--they have been domesticated too long. You can release them into the wild (they tried it in Australia to keep the rabbits down) but they will not go back to the land and turn feral. Well it's the same for humans. My Welsh family has been traced back to 1066 and there's not an indigenous soul in there. I am not going to belittle the milennia of culture, knowledge, study, wisdom and invention of the truly indigenous by claiming that I can "reclaim" all that for myself.
The indigenous are on the verge of extinction in this world, and appropriating them culturally is part of the process of devaluing their real existence so that it can be recuperated by the mainstream, and so that they can be rendered extinct without hitch--after all, we're all indigenous, aren't we? So they weren't that special after all. Nor was their ancestral habitat. Bye. Resist this crap, people. Rediscover your dignity, and your right to live on and with the earth. Support the fight of the indigenous for the right to life for themselves and their land. But don't steal their identity as well as their birthright. Don't claim to be indigenous if you are not.
the wild wood
For a while during my childhood my family lived in England. In the north of Yorkshire, on the edge of the national park. So after school and on weekends, I began to wander out of the housing estate and up the lane into the woods.
The woods were mostly beech and chestnut, but with some pine, hawthorn and oak mixed in. The path through the trees led to a river, and further across the river was more forest. When I went into the further areas of forest I found unexpected delights: a whole clearing of wild bluebells one spring; a huge ancient quarry covered in brambles, with caves in the chalky walls. Once I paused on the path and looked up through the trees and met the eyes of a small owl, sitting up there looking down.
In winter I followed the traces of rabbits and foxes through snow. When I was in the areas that weren't my habitual territory, I felt prickly and wary. I stalked along like a rodent, looking over my shoulder and just a wee bit twitchy. (I'm small and I'm female, so I tend to think like prey.)
Many years later, visiting my parents as an adult, I went up down to the woods, crossed the river and walked much, much further than I had ever done, until I came into a much denser part of the forest. It was an early spring afternoon, a little chilly but very clear. As I proceeded along the path through the conifers, I began to have A Feeling.
It was unlike any other feeling I had ever had in the woods, and it went much deeper than the sensible wariness of a small animal off its normal beaten track. It wasn't just that I was out of my territory--it was more that I felt out of my DEPTH. I felt I was in the presence of a power that was completely undomesticated. Like a truly wild, very large animal. This wood could eat me if it chose. It knew I was there and it was breathing all around me and tolerating me. I was awed, and not a little scared.
As I walked along, pondering what this feeling meant, and what it wanted me to do, a voice in my mind said, "I'm in the Wildwood". The Wildwood was the ancient, primary forest that covered Old Britain. The place of bears and wild boar, outlaws and Robin Hood. The domain of the Horned One and the source of legends and myths that persist to this day.
I continued along with my shoulders prickling for about ten steps, whereupon the path turned into a small clearing. There on a panel it said, "This forest was once part of the old wild wood, which covered most of Britain". (Or words to that effect.) All the hair stood up on the back of my head. Because I had KNOWN it, and it was the wood itself that told me.
The woods were mostly beech and chestnut, but with some pine, hawthorn and oak mixed in. The path through the trees led to a river, and further across the river was more forest. When I went into the further areas of forest I found unexpected delights: a whole clearing of wild bluebells one spring; a huge ancient quarry covered in brambles, with caves in the chalky walls. Once I paused on the path and looked up through the trees and met the eyes of a small owl, sitting up there looking down.
In winter I followed the traces of rabbits and foxes through snow. When I was in the areas that weren't my habitual territory, I felt prickly and wary. I stalked along like a rodent, looking over my shoulder and just a wee bit twitchy. (I'm small and I'm female, so I tend to think like prey.)
Many years later, visiting my parents as an adult, I went up down to the woods, crossed the river and walked much, much further than I had ever done, until I came into a much denser part of the forest. It was an early spring afternoon, a little chilly but very clear. As I proceeded along the path through the conifers, I began to have A Feeling.
It was unlike any other feeling I had ever had in the woods, and it went much deeper than the sensible wariness of a small animal off its normal beaten track. It wasn't just that I was out of my territory--it was more that I felt out of my DEPTH. I felt I was in the presence of a power that was completely undomesticated. Like a truly wild, very large animal. This wood could eat me if it chose. It knew I was there and it was breathing all around me and tolerating me. I was awed, and not a little scared.
As I walked along, pondering what this feeling meant, and what it wanted me to do, a voice in my mind said, "I'm in the Wildwood". The Wildwood was the ancient, primary forest that covered Old Britain. The place of bears and wild boar, outlaws and Robin Hood. The domain of the Horned One and the source of legends and myths that persist to this day.
I continued along with my shoulders prickling for about ten steps, whereupon the path turned into a small clearing. There on a panel it said, "This forest was once part of the old wild wood, which covered most of Britain". (Or words to that effect.) All the hair stood up on the back of my head. Because I had KNOWN it, and it was the wood itself that told me.
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