My favorite Radiohead song edited with some powerful images and video of the fucked up world we live in. Sometimes being an optimist is like being Camus’ Sisyphus, forever condemned to push that boulder to the top of the hill, only to watch it roll down again.
On a side note, I didn’t think anybody could do interpretive dance to this song until a friend in Austria, Danni, proved me otherwise…
Moby Dick is a novel that contains a vast depth that is as often cumbersome as the book itself. It is what the word Tome was made for. It also has the additional benefit of propping up a shortened table-leg, of allowing us to take our dinners on an even plane.
Nevertheless it is studded with passages of great beauty and thundering force. Its characters are archetypes that leap off the page and brandish their war-wounds with guzzling grace. Often the ship itself, the Pequod, stands as a great metaphor, or rather conceit, for the soul. Each of its nooks is granted a chapter unto itself, the narrator waxing poetic about its history and the histories of men that grazed it. Here is a section from a chapter called the Mast-Head, wherein it is Ishmael’s turn to whale-watch. He is talking about a certain type of seafarer that is prone to philosophical reveries.
“Very often do the captains of such ships take those absent-minded young philosophers to the task, upbraiding them with not feeling sufficient “interest” in the voyage; half-hinting that they are so hopelessly lost to all honorable ambition, as that in their secret souls they would rather not see whales than otherwise. But all in vain; those young Platonists have a notion that their vision is imperfect; they are short-sighted; what use, then, to strain the visual nerve? They have left their opera glasses at home.
“Why, thou monkey,” said a harpooneer to one of these lads, “we’ve been cruising now hard upon three years, and thou hast not raised a whale yet. Whales are as scarce as hen’s teeth whenever thou art up here.” Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Wickliff’s sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.
There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch, slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!”
The dangers of a well-stocked mind are many. Many a time I have bartered bitterly with the reality around me, offering it the vast and drafty spaces of intellect in return for a little less pain, a little room for heedlessness. The sharp edges of love are dulled in the sludge of theory. The complicated knots of conflict are glazed and glass-walled behind the barricades of symbol. Death is hunted down with a sawn-off, gutted, stuffed and mounted on the mantelpiece of Reason. This is the legacy of Plato. He has offered us a world so much more purer, so filled with the light of Eternal Forms that we eagerly shift our gaze to the heavens, ready to give up the hard contradictions of the world before our feet. What use has the hand for a hammer when it can live in a gifted house? We must nip this thinking at the bud. We must unearth the fish we have buried beneath our dreams, to give those lies their sap. Too often do we shirk our responsibilities with the placating voice of vision. Our divinity is placed beyond our death and so what use is there for earthly renovation? This is the thinking that drives the fundamentalists, the Rainbow Transcendentalists, and all manner of people that talk of higher worlds than these around us. Those worlds do exist, or rather, can exist. They must be made by the sweat of our brow, by the face that does not turn away from a blow. Those higher lives are merely modifications of thought; they are transformation and metamorphosis, but their difference is such that they seem to untrained eyes to be of another reality entirely. Look to sky and earth with equal longing. The world that streams through your pores is the only reality. But initially, it is not yours. It must be made that way. ‘God’ is something far greater than what cannot be grasped. It is the grasp itself and that which is grasped.
Look about you. This is the only life you will live. There is no other. Strain your eyes for those flitting forms and you will know their depths. The great whales of our world can be caught. To live without a safety-net is a difficult thing. Not all manage it. Wear your pain like a badge.
Here’s a little tribute video to Banksy, probably the most famous graffiti artist alive:
Street art is probably one of the most difficult discourses to pin down, mostly because it strives to operate outside of conventional artistic discourse. It is a product of urban culture that seeks to transcend or at least question the culture it comes out of. It is at once a reclamation of public space, pop artifact, and political subversion. The canvass is dragged out kicking and screaming from sterile gallery walls and static museum centerpieces. Most art attempts a dialog with the culture around it, but graffiti lives that dialog, embeds itself physically in the environment it wishes to comment upon. Because of this even the most benign graffiti is subversive. It assaults us when we least expect it; it transforms the familiar and the safe. I know C. is very interested this stuff (congrats again on the scholarship! – Berlin is graffiti central) so here is some more unusual street-art, this time based on human anatomy:
More can be found here.
And finally, here are some pictures I took in Berlin:
Here is an excellent example of how the US tries to strong-arm other states into conforming to their own draconian foreign policies.
The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty – NNPT, established in 1970, effectively divides the world into Those Who Possess The Right To Possess Nuclear Weapons And Related Technology (the Nuclear Weapons States – NWS) and Those Who Possess None Of Those Rights (Non-Nuclear Weapons States – NNWS). The only states that are NWS are the US, UK, Russia, France and China. The precedent for this is that they all developed and tested nuclear weapons before 1968. These are also the five permanent countries in the UN Security Council. Any other country that developed and tested nuclear weapons after 1968 is exempt from being regarded as an NWS, and according to the agreements of the NNPT, must abandon all research and use of nuclear weapons. This, as has been argued, divides the world arbitrarily into the nuclear Haves and the Have-Nots, thereby granting the Haves unprecedented political leverage on the world stage. There is no clear motive as to why the date of 1967 was chosen as the watermark, apart from superficial citations of the cold-war, etc… India, which conducted their first nuclear test barely seven years later, is exempt. They have been vyying for NWS status for quite awhile.
Because India is not a member of the NNPT, it has to seek other means by which to gain approval from the international spotlight as well as monetary and technological help in its civil nuclear enterprises. Seeing this conundrum the US has offered India a deal: It can bypass the NNPT (thereby enabling it to get help from NWS countries (the US in this case) regarding nuclear matters) by first agreeing to certain safeguards with the IAEA and NSG, and then by signing the Hyde Act. Now what is interesting is the various little foreign-policy related details of this act. Among a few are, as stated in the article, to follow the US in dissuading Iran from obtaining WMDs, and to abandon all India’s own plans of building oil pipelines in Iran. Huh. Signing these agreements also only puts India’s CIVIL nuclear plants under inspection, not their military ones.
What the US is effecively saying is that “Yeah, we understand you’re an up-and-coming nation, you’ve got the balls, you’ve got the tech, so if you want us to be your buddies, sign this thing. Yeah you won’t be able to conduct any more nuclear tests, but you already know what you got works, so there isn’t any point – keep building warheads if you must. Oh, and er… fuck Iran and all the other terrorists. And you’ve also got to sign this before Bush leaves because Obama aint gonna give it to you. Because you know, our foreign policy is based on which president is in office at the time.”
In regards to more personal issues, these ‘other terrorists’ also include the LTTE in Sri Lanka. Will India be forced to send its troops to Jaffna again so they can arbitrarily rape and kill more villagers? Forgive the hyperbole but that’s history for you.
And why is China, a country with a HUGE and ongoing list of human-rights atrocities, allowed to be a NWS while other countries with relatively more ethical standards denied that right? Of course, the idealist in me calls for a COMPLETE disarmament of all countries, but that isn’t going to happen for a long time.
“Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology. He would be better advised to abandon exact science, put away his scholar’s gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart through the world. There in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums, and hospitals, in drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling-halls, in the salons of the elegant, the Stock Exchanges, socialist meetings, churches, revivalist gatherings and ecstatic sects, through love and hate, through the experience of passion in every form in his own body, he would reap richer stores of knowledge than text-books a foot thick could give him, and he will know how to doctor the sick with a real knowledge of the human soul.”
Carl Jung
One of the great mysteries of our time has been solved. The veiled death of Antoine de Saint Exupery author of that magnificent tome of wisdom called The Little Prince, has been illuminated.
I am eternally grateful to Melon for my first initiation.
A moment’s silence, please, for the child that knows.
Tibet.
Its hard to get unbiased news reports on the situation there, considering China’s enormous efforts to implant its false rhetoric into to the foreign press. But for the most part we see through them.
More than a hundred people dead (which, of course the Chinese government doesn’t confirm), many more than that arrested.
China’s claim to Tibet is a historical error. The Mongols took over both China and Tibet, but regarded them as separate, distinct countries. After the fall of the Mongol Empire Tibet was free from 1349 to 1642. It was only during the time of the 5th Dalai Lama that Chinese influence in Tibet began to grow. Tibet has effectively showcased its sovereignty on numerous occasions before the Communist Government’s ‘official’ proclamations that Tibet be considered a part of China in 1951.
All the documents involving Tibet’s foreign relations before this time indicate that it was treated as an autonomous, independent state.
My fists are clenched.
You can’t afford to be neutral on a moving train.
- Serj Tanakian
Ok, here’s another one of those TED talks, this time by mathematician Ron Eglash. He connects Georg Cantor (inventor of set-theory and the infinity of infinities) and the subsequent fractal math to understand the structure of African villages. You have all heard about how these amazing recursive lines occur as self-organizing principles in nature, in our very brains in fact, but I guarantee you will have your mind blown. I’m sitting speechless right now (which is why I’m writing). Watching this gave me tingles down my spine. You owe it to your self to watch this. At the very least it will give you a WHOLE new appreciation and respect for African culture.
(A friend will point out to me at this point that Africa is a continent dummy. Yes, I’m well aware of this fact; but the organizing principles that Eglash talks about has wide-ranging implications that wholly transcend the various and sometimes bloody borders of that vast land):
