Age, I suppose, is accumulating years and years of reading in your head, wondering how much of it has been lost under the huge barrage of new information collected over time, until one day you recognize Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson in a flash in a random line in a short story even though no references are given - " What is an Indian? Is it a boy who can sing the body electric or a woman who could not stop for death?"*
*'The Toughest Indian in the World'
Sherman Alexie
* * * * * * * * * * *
Age, I suppose, is also listening to a young person pour out her anger and anguish and also hear what she is not saying, and having the grace to not show that you know, because you realize that she is not yet ready to talk about it, and youth, being what it is, needs to save its face, its so very vulnerable face....
* * * * * * * * * * *
And yet again, age is also answering the most stupid of questions with kindness without Ever showing any sign of contempt or ridicule, because there are different kinds of knowledge and as long as we are curious we are getting somewhere, and in the end, not knowing the Big Bang theory is just not as catastrophic as not knowing how to care....
Saturday, January 22, 2011
The hallucination of contemporary life
In the book 'Lila', Phaedrus attends a Native American Church ceremony at a Northern Cheyenne reservation with his anthropologist friend. During the ceremony the Indians use a sacramental food called peyote that produces visions that are important for a certain understanding they seek. Peyote in its synthetic form is LSD.
"...The majority opposition to peyote reflected a cultural bias, the belief, unsupported by scientific or historical evidence, that 'hallucinatory' experience is automatically bad. Since hallucinations are a form of insanity, the term 'hallucinogen' is clearly pejorative. Like early descriptions of Buddhism as a 'heathen' religion and Islam as 'barbaric', it begs some metaphysical questions. The Indians who use it as a part of their ceremony might with equal accuracy call it a 'de-hallucinogen', since it's their claim that it removes the hallucination of contemporary life and reveals the reality buried beneath them.
There is actually some scientific support for this Indian point of view. Experiments have shown that spiders fed LSD do not wander around doing purposeless things as one might expect a 'hallucination' would cause them to do, but instead spin an abnormally perfect, symmetrical web."
from
'Lila. An Inquiry into Morals'
Robert M Pirsig
Note: I am not advocating drugs here. That was a thought-provoking observation worthy of, and requiring, reflection and further study, that's all.
"...The majority opposition to peyote reflected a cultural bias, the belief, unsupported by scientific or historical evidence, that 'hallucinatory' experience is automatically bad. Since hallucinations are a form of insanity, the term 'hallucinogen' is clearly pejorative. Like early descriptions of Buddhism as a 'heathen' religion and Islam as 'barbaric', it begs some metaphysical questions. The Indians who use it as a part of their ceremony might with equal accuracy call it a 'de-hallucinogen', since it's their claim that it removes the hallucination of contemporary life and reveals the reality buried beneath them.
There is actually some scientific support for this Indian point of view. Experiments have shown that spiders fed LSD do not wander around doing purposeless things as one might expect a 'hallucination' would cause them to do, but instead spin an abnormally perfect, symmetrical web."
from
'Lila. An Inquiry into Morals'
Robert M Pirsig
Note: I am not advocating drugs here. That was a thought-provoking observation worthy of, and requiring, reflection and further study, that's all.
I know it all
“I know it all, second renter,
I know it all,
Down to the very cold you feel.”
Mrs. R, my poetry teacher who introduced me to Tagore and Kazantzakis and de-coded the opaque world of T.S. Eliot for us, once sent me this haiku in response to one of the angst-ridden letters of my youth.
The knowledge that someone understood, that someone has walked this path before, that someone will not ridicule your pain, that someone will listen to your story without irritation or indifference - how infinitely precious.
In the rented house of each stage of life, is it this "I know" that you search for, and find so rarely?
I know it all,
Down to the very cold you feel.”
Mrs. R, my poetry teacher who introduced me to Tagore and Kazantzakis and de-coded the opaque world of T.S. Eliot for us, once sent me this haiku in response to one of the angst-ridden letters of my youth.
The knowledge that someone understood, that someone has walked this path before, that someone will not ridicule your pain, that someone will listen to your story without irritation or indifference - how infinitely precious.
In the rented house of each stage of life, is it this "I know" that you search for, and find so rarely?
Dave Barry: Bring Back Captain Video :) :)
Okay, you've read all of Haruki Murakami. All of Bill Bryson. All of Milan Kundera. Practically all of J.M.Coetzee. You cringe each time you go to the bookshops. And here, today, you're almost done with all of Dave Barry. What will you do for your laughter dose the rest of your life? Slow Down. Sloooow Dowwwn. What If the world does not end in 2012?
"...We're also going to have to do something about children's television. Today's children watch shows like "Sesame Street", which teaches them that the world is full of friendly interracial adults and cute puppets and letters that form recognizable patterns. This is, of course, a pack of lies. When I was a kid, in New York, my friends and I watched shows like "Captain Video", which taught us that the world was full of evil forces trying to destroy the earth, which turns out to be absolutely correct.
"Captain Video" consisted of five episodes a week, no one of which cost more than eleven dollars to produce. The episodes always took place in Captain Video's spaceship. It was an extremely low budget spaceship. For example, Captain Video's radio was a regular telephone handset, except he held it as if it were a microphone and talked into the listening end.
..They also don't get Meaningful Social Lessons, the kind we got from shows about cowboys and Indians. These shows taught us that not all Indians were savage killers. For example, Tonto was a good Indian. As I recall, all the others were savage killers."
Page 67, 'Bring Back Captain Video', from 'Bad Habits' by Dave Barry, author of 'Babies and Other Hazards of Sex' and 'Claw Your Way to the Top'.
"...We're also going to have to do something about children's television. Today's children watch shows like "Sesame Street", which teaches them that the world is full of friendly interracial adults and cute puppets and letters that form recognizable patterns. This is, of course, a pack of lies. When I was a kid, in New York, my friends and I watched shows like "Captain Video", which taught us that the world was full of evil forces trying to destroy the earth, which turns out to be absolutely correct.
"Captain Video" consisted of five episodes a week, no one of which cost more than eleven dollars to produce. The episodes always took place in Captain Video's spaceship. It was an extremely low budget spaceship. For example, Captain Video's radio was a regular telephone handset, except he held it as if it were a microphone and talked into the listening end.
..They also don't get Meaningful Social Lessons, the kind we got from shows about cowboys and Indians. These shows taught us that not all Indians were savage killers. For example, Tonto was a good Indian. As I recall, all the others were savage killers."
Page 67, 'Bring Back Captain Video', from 'Bad Habits' by Dave Barry, author of 'Babies and Other Hazards of Sex' and 'Claw Your Way to the Top'.
Home
July 2006
At the end of it all, you don't want to be a global citizen, you want to belong, belong to one city somewhere, feel that you are Coming Home and look down and smile with a hint of tears in your throat as the plane comes down from the clouds and the yellow lights now start moving and you can make out roads and sodium-vapour lamps, and you know all this unreal abstraction from up here will soon transform to the solid reality of a vehicle that leads you to a door that will take you to that corner of the bed which has your very own blanket and pillow, and nothing, nothing can get real-er than that and you are happy to learn that yet another time...
And so, you wish you could have one city where you could belong belong belong, which is overwhelmingly home home home and which you could look down from a plane window and feel something, something, something other than relief at finally getting out of an aircraft where the airhostess asks you Veg or NonVeg? while you desperately search for some tissue to wipe your eyes.
The molecule that helps us decide among alternatives
In today's encore excerpt - dopamine, pleasure, and too much pleasure:
"The importance of dopamine was discovered by accident. In 1954, James Olds and Peter Milner, two neuroscientists at McGill University, decided to implant an electrode deep into the center of a rat's brain. The precise placement of the electrode was largely happenstance; at the time, the geography of the mind remained a mystery. But Olds and Milner got lucky. They inserted the needle right next to the nucleus accumbens (NAcc), a part of the brain that generates pleasurable feelings. Whenever you eat a piece of chocolate cake, or listen to a favorite pop song, or watch your favorite team win the World Series, it is your NAcc that helps you feel so happy.
"But Olds and Milner quickly discovered that too much pleasure can be fatal. They placed the electrodes in several rodents' brains and then ran a small current into each wire, making the NAccs continually excited. The scientists noticed that the rodents lost interest in everything. They stopped eating and drinking. All courtship behavior ceased. The rats would just huddle in the corners of their cages, transfixed by their bliss. Within days, all of the animals had perished. They died of thirst.
"It took several decades of painstaking research, but neuroscientists eventually discovered that the rats had been suffering from an excess of dopamine. The stimulation of the NAcc triggered a massive release of the neurotransmitter, which overwhelmed the rodents with ecstasy. In humans, addictive drugs work the same way: a crack addict who has just gotten a fix is no different than a rat in an electrical rapture. The brains of both creatures have been blinded by pleasure. This, then, became the dopaminergic cliche; it was the chemical explanation for sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
"But happiness isn't the only feeling that dopamine produces. Scientists now know that this neurotransmitter helps to regulate all of our emotions, from the first stirrings of love to the most visceral forms of disgust. It is the common neural currency of the mind, the molecule that helps us decide among alternatives. By looking at how dopamine works inside the brain, we can see why feelings are capable of providing deep insights. While Plato disparaged emotions as irrational and untrustworthy - the wild horses of the soul - they actually reflect an enormous amount of invisible analysis."
Author: Jonah Lehrer
Title: How We Decide
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Date: Copyright 2009 by Jonah Lehrer
Pages: Kindle Loc. 463-538.
From delanceyplace.com
"The importance of dopamine was discovered by accident. In 1954, James Olds and Peter Milner, two neuroscientists at McGill University, decided to implant an electrode deep into the center of a rat's brain. The precise placement of the electrode was largely happenstance; at the time, the geography of the mind remained a mystery. But Olds and Milner got lucky. They inserted the needle right next to the nucleus accumbens (NAcc), a part of the brain that generates pleasurable feelings. Whenever you eat a piece of chocolate cake, or listen to a favorite pop song, or watch your favorite team win the World Series, it is your NAcc that helps you feel so happy.
"But Olds and Milner quickly discovered that too much pleasure can be fatal. They placed the electrodes in several rodents' brains and then ran a small current into each wire, making the NAccs continually excited. The scientists noticed that the rodents lost interest in everything. They stopped eating and drinking. All courtship behavior ceased. The rats would just huddle in the corners of their cages, transfixed by their bliss. Within days, all of the animals had perished. They died of thirst.
"It took several decades of painstaking research, but neuroscientists eventually discovered that the rats had been suffering from an excess of dopamine. The stimulation of the NAcc triggered a massive release of the neurotransmitter, which overwhelmed the rodents with ecstasy. In humans, addictive drugs work the same way: a crack addict who has just gotten a fix is no different than a rat in an electrical rapture. The brains of both creatures have been blinded by pleasure. This, then, became the dopaminergic cliche; it was the chemical explanation for sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
"But happiness isn't the only feeling that dopamine produces. Scientists now know that this neurotransmitter helps to regulate all of our emotions, from the first stirrings of love to the most visceral forms of disgust. It is the common neural currency of the mind, the molecule that helps us decide among alternatives. By looking at how dopamine works inside the brain, we can see why feelings are capable of providing deep insights. While Plato disparaged emotions as irrational and untrustworthy - the wild horses of the soul - they actually reflect an enormous amount of invisible analysis."
Author: Jonah Lehrer
Title: How We Decide
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Date: Copyright 2009 by Jonah Lehrer
Pages: Kindle Loc. 463-538.
From delanceyplace.com
Thursday, January 20, 2011
I listen
I sit beside the fire and think
By JRR Tolkien
I sit beside the fire and think of all that I have seen,
of meadow-flowers and butterflies in summers that have been;
Of yellow leaves and gossamer in autumns that there were,
with morning mist and silver sun and wind upon my hair.
I sit beside the fire and think of how the world will be
when winter comes without a spring that I shall ever see.
For still there are so many things that I have never seen:
in every wood in every spring there is a different green.
I sit beside the fire and think of people long ago,
and people who will see a world that I shall never know.
But all the while I sit and think of times there were before,
I listen for returning feet and voices at the door.
From here: http://www.munnaontherun.com/2011/01/returning-feet.html
By JRR Tolkien
I sit beside the fire and think of all that I have seen,
of meadow-flowers and butterflies in summers that have been;
Of yellow leaves and gossamer in autumns that there were,
with morning mist and silver sun and wind upon my hair.
I sit beside the fire and think of how the world will be
when winter comes without a spring that I shall ever see.
For still there are so many things that I have never seen:
in every wood in every spring there is a different green.
I sit beside the fire and think of people long ago,
and people who will see a world that I shall never know.
But all the while I sit and think of times there were before,
I listen for returning feet and voices at the door.
From here: http://www.munnaontherun.com/2011/01/returning-feet.html
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Returning to the Great Stories
This kind of reminded me of Alain de Botton's article where he talks about how religions re-inforce the need to return to the known and delve deeper, while in the rest of our lives, the key word is novelty, and the endless chasing of it.
....................................................................................
"...It didn’t matter that the story had begun, because Kathakali discovered long ago that the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen.. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t.
In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again.
That is their mystery and their magic."
from
'The God of Small Things', Arundhati Roy (excerpt sent by a reader, I had forgotten this)
....................................................................................
"...It didn’t matter that the story had begun, because Kathakali discovered long ago that the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen.. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t.
In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again.
That is their mystery and their magic."
from
'The God of Small Things', Arundhati Roy (excerpt sent by a reader, I had forgotten this)
Morning
Why do we bother with the rest of the day,
the swale of the afternoon,
the sudden dip into evening,
then night with his notorious perfumes,
his many-pointed stars?
This is the best-
throwing off the light covers,
feet on the cold floor,
and buzzing around the house on espresso-
maybe a splash of water on the face,
a palmful of vitamins-
but mostly buzzing around the house on espresso,
dictionary and atlas open on the rug,
the typewriter waiting for the key of the head,
a cello on the radio,
and, if necessary, the windows-
trees fifty, a hundred years old
out there,
heavy clouds on the way
and the lawn steaming like a horse
in the early morning.
Billy Collins
Picnic, Lightning
the swale of the afternoon,
the sudden dip into evening,
then night with his notorious perfumes,
his many-pointed stars?
This is the best-
throwing off the light covers,
feet on the cold floor,
and buzzing around the house on espresso-
maybe a splash of water on the face,
a palmful of vitamins-
but mostly buzzing around the house on espresso,
dictionary and atlas open on the rug,
the typewriter waiting for the key of the head,
a cello on the radio,
and, if necessary, the windows-
trees fifty, a hundred years old
out there,
heavy clouds on the way
and the lawn steaming like a horse
in the early morning.
Billy Collins
Picnic, Lightning
Wanderer
Wanderer, your footsteps are
the road, and nothing more;
wanderer, there is no road,
the road is made by walking.
By walking one makes the road,
and upon glancing behind
one sees the path
that never will be trod again.
Wanderer, there is no road--
Only wind trails upon the sea.
Antonio Machado
Thanks, K.
the road, and nothing more;
wanderer, there is no road,
the road is made by walking.
By walking one makes the road,
and upon glancing behind
one sees the path
that never will be trod again.
Wanderer, there is no road--
Only wind trails upon the sea.
Antonio Machado
Thanks, K.
Mari
Read my second book based in Nagaland - 'Mari', by Easterine Kire (Iralu). A simple story, beautifully told. Easy flowing narration - and very visual.
Summary
Kohima, 1944. The Japanese invade India, life changes overnight, and seventeen-year-old MariO’Leary and her sisters are evacuated from their home and separated from the rest of their family. Even as she pines for her fiancé Vic, a soldier in the British army, Mari and her sisters are forced to run from village to village, camping in fields, eating herbs for food, seeking shelter or a trustworthy friend, until the madness has passed.
A sensitive recounting of the true story of a young girl during World War II, Mari brings alive a simpler time in a forgotten place that was ravaged by war before it was noticed by the rest of the world.
About the Author
Easterine Kire (Iralu) has written several books in English including three collections of poetry and short stories. Her first novel, A Naga Village Remembered, was the first-ever Naga novel to be published. Easterine has translated 200 oral poems from her native language Tenyidie into English. Her forthcoming books include Forest Song; a volume of Spirit Stories; and Bitter Wormwood, a novel on the Indo- Naga conflict. She is founder and partner in a publishing house, Barkweaver, which gathers and publishes Naga folktales.
You can buy it here, they deliver within India: http://www.flipkart.com/mari-easterine-kire-book-9350290187 I picked up the book at the Odyssey bookshop.
Read about Easterine Kire and her story, in her own words: http://www.icorn.org/articles.php?var=8
Summary
Kohima, 1944. The Japanese invade India, life changes overnight, and seventeen-year-old MariO’Leary and her sisters are evacuated from their home and separated from the rest of their family. Even as she pines for her fiancé Vic, a soldier in the British army, Mari and her sisters are forced to run from village to village, camping in fields, eating herbs for food, seeking shelter or a trustworthy friend, until the madness has passed.
A sensitive recounting of the true story of a young girl during World War II, Mari brings alive a simpler time in a forgotten place that was ravaged by war before it was noticed by the rest of the world.
About the Author
Easterine Kire (Iralu) has written several books in English including three collections of poetry and short stories. Her first novel, A Naga Village Remembered, was the first-ever Naga novel to be published. Easterine has translated 200 oral poems from her native language Tenyidie into English. Her forthcoming books include Forest Song; a volume of Spirit Stories; and Bitter Wormwood, a novel on the Indo- Naga conflict. She is founder and partner in a publishing house, Barkweaver, which gathers and publishes Naga folktales.
You can buy it here, they deliver within India: http://www.flipkart.com/mari-easterine-kire-book-9350290187 I picked up the book at the Odyssey bookshop.
Read about Easterine Kire and her story, in her own words: http://www.icorn.org/articles.php?var=8
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Transient
"....Sringaaram. Haasyam. Karunam. Raudram. Veeram. Bhayaanakam. Beebhalsam. You [the Kathakali artist] have learnt to identify the thought that leads to each one of these emotions and to school your features accordingly. You have seen how first the thought, then your breath, then your face resolves the process from knowing to experiencing to expressing. There is a build-up, so to say. Not so with adbhutam. For this emotion alone does not offer you a time frame within which you may work on the feeling.
For adbhutam is wonder. And wonder is immediate. It cannot be premeditated or calculated. If you do that, it isn't wonder.
That is the hallmark of wonder. A curiosity to know, a yearning to possess. And when you do, the wonder ceases. That is the nature of adbhutam. To be transient. For you will never known it again in exactly the same degree."
Book 3: Adbhutam
'Mistress'
Anita Nair
For adbhutam is wonder. And wonder is immediate. It cannot be premeditated or calculated. If you do that, it isn't wonder.
That is the hallmark of wonder. A curiosity to know, a yearning to possess. And when you do, the wonder ceases. That is the nature of adbhutam. To be transient. For you will never known it again in exactly the same degree."
Book 3: Adbhutam
'Mistress'
Anita Nair
The life of the mind
The life of the mind, he thinks to himself: is that what we have dedicated ourselves to, I and these other lonely wanderers in the bowels of the British museum? Will there be a reward for us one day? Will our solitariness lift, or is the life of the mind its own reward?
Youth
J.M.Coetzee
Youth
J.M.Coetzee
Discovery
And a season to read brilliant Swedish murder mysteries...
"When we finally find what we have been looking for in the darkness, we nearly always discover that it is exactly that. Darkness."
"When we finally find what we have been looking for in the darkness, we nearly always discover that it is exactly that. Darkness."
C.G.Reinhart, police officer
from 'The Mind's Eye' by Hakan Nesser
Go forth masked
On the Mother Tongue
"...For at times, when I listen to the words of English that emerge from my mouth, I have a disquieting sense that the one I hear is not the one I call myself. Rather, it is as though some other person (but who?) were being imitated, followed, even mimicked. Larvatus prodeo. [Descartes - "Go forth masked"]
Perhaps it is so that all languages are, finally, foreign languages, alien to our animal being. But in a way that is precisely inarticulate, inarticulable, English does not feel to me like a resting place, a home. It just happens to be a language over whose resources I have achieved some mastery.
My case can certainly not be unique. Among middle-class Indians, for example, there must be many who have done their schooling in English, who routinely speak English in the workplace and at home (throwing in the odd local locution for colouring), who command other languages only imperfectly, yet who, as they listen to themselves speak or as they read what they have written, have the uneasy feeling that there is something false going on."
Page 195. Diary of a Bad Year
J.M.Coetzee (Nobel Prize for Literature, 2003)
"...For at times, when I listen to the words of English that emerge from my mouth, I have a disquieting sense that the one I hear is not the one I call myself. Rather, it is as though some other person (but who?) were being imitated, followed, even mimicked. Larvatus prodeo. [Descartes - "Go forth masked"]
Perhaps it is so that all languages are, finally, foreign languages, alien to our animal being. But in a way that is precisely inarticulate, inarticulable, English does not feel to me like a resting place, a home. It just happens to be a language over whose resources I have achieved some mastery.
My case can certainly not be unique. Among middle-class Indians, for example, there must be many who have done their schooling in English, who routinely speak English in the workplace and at home (throwing in the odd local locution for colouring), who command other languages only imperfectly, yet who, as they listen to themselves speak or as they read what they have written, have the uneasy feeling that there is something false going on."
Page 195. Diary of a Bad Year
J.M.Coetzee (Nobel Prize for Literature, 2003)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)