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13.6.12
6.6.12
4.6.12
Chronicle of a Journey to the Dark Side of the Earth: Part 6
Habeas Corpus
A crowded bus with its suspension askew
rattles by on its way to the factory, the air inside rank with sweat and
cigarette smoke and garlic‑ginger farts.
Faces peer out through the fogged and dirty windows, each lost in solitude,
reflecting perhaps on fickle generosity, or with anticipation for pungent,
steaming dumplings dipped in vinegar for lunch, or the exuberant madness of the
New Year's pyrotechnics, or sad little sister's second husband, who beats her
when he drinks.
Transcendence
is no longer possible outside the privacy of the mind. Privacy is no longer possible outside of
dreams. The process of experiencing
aliveness has been anaesthetized.
Sensation is numb. Uniqueness is
anomaly. Solitude and a sense that all
is fate, anxiety, joy that lacks laughter, sorrow that lacks tears, depression,
pain, despair and cruelty; these are the themes. Every anonymous death has left a lingering
echo.
The
neat lines dividing the periods of history are but an illusion. There are ox ghosts afoot on the remote,
dusty, yellow earth. Mythical monsters
incarnate, their fangs and lips are bloody from having gorged on children. Spiritual culture is as bleak as an endless
sea of dry grass that undulates and ripples under a perpetual wind that howls
to the horizon in all directions. People
are adrift in a void of ignorance with nothing left to believe in. Humiliation and degradation are the constant
and inescapable facts of existence.
In
the absence of either rules or common sense, individual functionaries have been
reduced to doing only what is expected by those above them in the highly
centralized structure, to whom it has become absolutely clear that political
power flows from the barrel of a gun.
Social justice is subject to the semi‑coherent whims of aging strongmen,
who are hooked to infusions of rhinoceros horn and ginseng and little brown
balls of opium, and herbal medicines that taste like a dank basement, enhanced
by doses of calcium and crushed pearls, arsenic, saffron and musk, and
applications of lion and bear fat, castor oil and carbolic acid, mustard oil
and oil of cloves and a diet including turtle eggs and the testicles of goats,
to abet the rape of illiterate village girls with pretty faces.
In
excess of thirty million people starved to death. The half‑completed, then
abandoned, blocks of inadequately conceived industrial enterprises covered with
soot and coal dust remain as a legacy.
The grotesque chunks of frozen masonry are like a fantasy of the post‑nuclear
landscape. Mighty rivers spring to life
in the high mountains, only to reach the sea, covered in a black, oily scum,
putrid with sewage and tossing up green, orange, yellow, frothy, chemical foam.
In
the grey deep‑freeze of a spiritual winter, old slogans and empty rhetoric
recycle endlessly in the editorials. The
evening news announcer begins his broadcast by addressing his audience as
"comrade viewers." The current
ideological task, says the television, is to convince the youth that communism
is superior to capitalism. There is only
one right idea. Superiors will dictate
and inferiors will do what they are told.
Those who brought habeas corpus cases on behalf of people who had
disappeared have all themselves disappeared.
To be continued...
To be continued...
1.6.12
31.5.12
Homo Sapiens: An Illustrated Field Guide
Like many other animal species, Homo sapiens are said to be sexually dimorphic. Not only are male sapiens on average somewhat larger than females, but since very early in their evolutionary history, the sapiens sexes have had very distinct cultural and behavioral patterns as well. Typically, in the context of the ancient hunter-gatherer cultures from which all modern sapiens arose, the females were relegated to gathering wild plant material, maintaining the hearth, and of course, nurturing the young. In these circumstances the characteristic attributes of female sapiens - their behavioral bias to utilize social mechanisms rather than direct action, and their heightened empathy compared to males, for example - must have emerged through natural selection.
This arrangement left sapiens males in charge of hunting other animals and providing dietary protein in the form of meat. This of course involved the development of weapons, skills and cooperative strategy. In the process, the typical male sapiens aggressiveness and tendency toward risk-taking must have been selected for as well.
30.5.12
Stones of a Prescribed Weight
As the plane banks for its final approach to Tehran ’s Mehrabad
Airport
Of all the
changes that have swept Iran
during the more than three decades since the fall of the shah, those that have
affected women are the most visible symbols of the regime that came to power. The
transformation was both complete and abrupt, considering that the tradition of hejab – Islamic covering for women – had
all but died out in Iran ,
at least for the urban majority, at the time of the revolution.
A glance
through almost any middle class family photo album reveals all the familiar
snaps. There are wedding days with brides in white, girls in bathing suits at
the beach and lovers holding hands. Women
appear in sun dresses, tennis shorts and the full range of female hair styles.
Leaf
further back in time and it is obvious that the ‘60s hit Iran with many of the same phenomena that Europe
and North America experienced. Adolescent boys
sported long hair and bell-bottoms. Girls wore mini-dresses. It is only when
one gets back to the faded, yellow photographs of grandparents and
great-grandparents that one begins to see head coverings on the women.
The effects
of rapid industrialization and urbanization on the country, together with a
1934 ban on the chador by Reza Shah, the last shah’s father, had removed the
custom from all but the most traditional sectors of society. Indeed, through
most of the ‘60s and ‘70s, particularly in the middle-class areas of Tehran , while women
covered to attend the mosque, it was the prostitutes who habitually wore the
chador, not for religious reasons, but to cover the skimpy costumes of their
trade.
During the
final days of the monarchy, however, wearing a head scarf became a symbol of
political protest. Because there was such widespread discontent and because
Ayatollah Khomeini, a religious man, was able to focus this discontent, women
took to wearing the scarf during the street demonstrations out of respect for
the perceived spiritual aspects of the uprising.
While a
sizable minority of women embraced this return to traditional values with
enthusiasm, many soon found themselves trapped unwillingly behind the veil. As
radical fundamentalists hijacked what had started as essentially a middle class revolution, patrols of Revolutionary
Guards appeared on the streets, meting out instant justice to those who failed
to comply with the new moral order.
Although
enforcement is extremely haphazard, the penalties for transgression are severe.
From time to time, newspapers publish a menu of torments – 70 lashes for
lipstick, 40 lashes for eye makeup or nail polish.
Those
caught in more serious violations of the moral code, prostitutes, for example, or even just unlucky lovers, are in deep trouble. They
are buried up to the neck in sand with their head covered. A hundred local
people, marshaled by the religious authorities, are then gathered in a circle around
them and throw stones of a prescribed weight.
29.5.12
Ruins of Iskandar
Located in the Kashmir Valley about 40 kms west of the Indian city of Srinagar, Iskandar (Alexandria) was built by Greek colonists in the wake of Alexander the Great's 4th century BCE conquests. It is notable for representing the farthest eastern penetration of Hellenistic cultural influences. Iskandar flourished only briefly. Beginning after the death of the conqueror in 323BCE, Iskandar was slowly swamped and assimilated by the indigenous culture.
28.5.12
The Smart Money
How can anyone take free trade seriously? Clearly no one in any
government or the global corporate world does. The parts of the world economy
that are able to compete internationally are primarily the state-subsidized
ones: resource extraction, capital-intensive agriculture, high-tech industry,
weapons, etc. The irony is that research and development is paid for with
taxes, while anything marketable is taken over by the private sector. This
combination of public subsidy and private profit is called free enterprise. It’s
a sad state of affairs when the best investment advice urges oil futures, and
shares in weapons manufacturers and privatized water. But that’s where the
smart money seems to be going.
27.5.12
26.5.12
After All
The false prosperity that the West has enjoyed since it began
its rise to world dominance at the end of the medieval period was fueled initially
by plunder. Think of the Spanish in Mexico
and Peru . Think of the British in Bengal and North America .
Once this
dominance began to stabilize in the face of colonialism and the emergence of
capitalism, the system ran on exploitation. Think of the slave trade. Think of Indian cotton, woven in Manchester and sold back
to the Indians.
Most
recently, the system has been powered by unprecedented amounts of debt.
Initially,
this debt was relatively easy to come to terms with, partly by virtue of the
fact that its relative size diminished in relation to that of the expanding
economy, and partly through inflation, which reduced the significance of the
actual amount of the debt in relation to the amount of money in circulation.
The problem
is, of course, that debt, even when created out of thin air, like a Treasury bill,
is effectively a promise tied to some sort of resource. It is based on the idea that something will
eventually be produced and sold by someone in order to generate the capital
required to pay the debt.
Unfortunately
there are now non-negotiable constraints on economic expansion. Even the desperate optimism of the political
and financial classes will not save the situation. After all, there is no law
that the exceptional rise of the West and the asymmetrical distribution of
global resources must continue.
25.5.12
24.5.12
Let Me Count the Ways
I love thee
With serotonin produced in my raphe nuclei.
I love thee
With testosterone receptors deep in my hypothalamus.
I love thee
With dopamine that floods my primitive reptilian brain.
23.5.12
22.5.12
Chronicle of a Journey to the Dark Side of the Earth: Part 5
Too
Gruesome to Run
Guernica
To be continued...
There are mobs of lepers, blind people, the
maimed and the crippled. In addition to
whiffs of burning, a close approximation to whatever brimstone smells like, the
sharp stink of festering shit and stale urine hangs over these slums of gobbed
and spittled pavements and knotted, sooty, noisy, honking traffic, drought,
then flooding, disease then hopelessness.
Confronted
by a gruesome, thrusting, leprous stump, a nightmarishly eroded face, pleading,
streaming eyes, we shake off the beggar children clinging like tenacious burrs,
their filthy fingers in our pockets. The only sanctuary for meditation is a
stinking latrine, the noises outside coming from the traffic of whores and
soldiers and dogs fighting in the dusty street, and the grinding wheels of the
carts, piled high with swaying people and baggage and dirty bedrolls and
lolling children, pulled by desperate, frightened, wide-eyed, wild horses and donkeys
with toast-rack ribs, the flies swarming over the sores in their hides made by
the constant rubbing of the harness, all fleeing for their lives.
We
are having documentaries instead of dreams. Each night the same images: people
weeping, others bleeding, eruptions of cruelty and savagery, enduring
injustices and callousness, bewilderment, shame, sorrow and pointlessness.
A
man was arrested for riding a train without a ticket. He spent the next thirty years in jail
awaiting trial because his case papers had been misplaced.
There
are thousands of refugees pouring into the city in advance of the invading
army. Armed squatters are stealing other people’s homes. A new and more
malevolent breed of gunmen is emerging onto the streets. Hundreds of civilians
are dying in the bombing raids, more than half of them women and children who
are not, and can not be, criminals or terrorists or any other kind of enemy.
Reporters
speak from their hotel balconies, the smoke from the burning slums nicely
framed against the clear blue sky in the background.
“As
political alternatives have been eliminated,” they say, “the difficulty of
deciding has been compounded by the difficulty of living with what has already
been decided. The stagnation of the state has given rise to an alienated
politics which oppresses rather than liberates.”
Thus
the stage is set for an epic catastrophe. All the elements of farce and
tragedy, from hubris and delusion to final calamity are in place. Officers dine
at high table in their ambassador’s ruined residence, their red wine served by
liveried waiters, their table graced by attractive women.
A
glad-handing politician in the face of a full-scale legitimacy crisis passes
through a hostile crowd followed by a camera. People can smell his sweat.
“This
is your land. These are your houses, your meadows and gardens, your memories,”
he tells them. “The nation is glorious, its people steadfast.”
From
which direction will death explode in on him? Will it be a smiling,
handshaking, garlanded suicide bomber like with Rajiv? Chopped down by rifle
fire from her bodyguards, like Rajiv’s mom? A cool sniper, with or without a
conspiracy, as with JFK and King? Strung up in the marketplace like Najibula? Cut
down in a cold rain of hot angry lead like Mr. and Mrs. Ceausescu? Bazooka-ed
in exile in his Mercedes, like Somoza? Loneliness and pneumonia in a filthy,
freezing, concrete cell like Liu Shao Chi?
Whichever, there’s anticipation that unpredictably, one day the crowd
will turn like a pack of dogs.
The
photographs show severed heads and dismembered corpses, amid the rubble of
ruined villages, each a Golgotha, a To be continued...
21.5.12
Homo Sapiens: An Illustrated Field Guide
Early in their evolutionary history, Homo sapiens began
expressing a unique urge to understand and influence their environment, seeking
to explain phenomena and manipulate materials. This instinct led to the development
of technology. Beginning with the
mastery of fire and the fashioning of stone tools in the Paleolithic, sapiens
slowly and incrementally accumulated a vast array of tools and skills, eventually
allowing them to invade virtually every habitat on the planet.
Technological development was excruciatingly slow for tens
of thousands of years, until, beginning in the era we call the Enlightenment,
advances in the natural sciences laid the foundation for an explosion of
technical expansion. Since then, sapiens
technology has become so refined that some members of the species are even capable
of making replacement body parts.
20.5.12
Thinking the Unthinkable
The era of ever-increasing rates of resource extraction,
manufacturing and consumption is over, done, finished, for good. Only charlatans, fools and the willfully
blind, claim to believe otherwise.
So too is
the exponential growth of technology which is running up against the finite
amount of wisdom so far accumulated by the sciences. There will be further refinements, no doubt, as
the last few pieces of the puzzle of the material universe fall into place, but
no more big game-changing great leaps, as there were, for example, with the harnessing of fire,
the invention of moveable type, the development of steam power, or even, most
recently, the emergence of the digital.
Both
phenomena are only blips on the timeline of human history in any case. We have spent countless millennia living in
static economic environments, making little or no technical progress. The past three hundred years or so have been
an anomaly.
Thomas Malthus was right. Economic growth in
the long term is now out of the question. In a world in which the human population grows
faster than the economy there will always be a looser for every winner. Moreover, the losers will naturally suspect
the winners of taking unfair advantage, if not of outright racketeering, and in
most cases they will be right. As world population peaks about midway through the present century, in the face of the inevitable competition for food, water and fuel, the losers will also be largely dead.
The
economic order is neither just nor sustainable.
Everywhere the globalizing free market squeezes the middle class,
enriches small elites and broadens the membership of the excluded. At current rates of consumption and population growth, global
economic collapse is imminent. Do the
math. It’s time to begin thinking the
hitherto unthinkable.
18.5.12
Ruins of Datong
15.5.12
14.5.12
Seeing Through the Smoke
As I was growing up, the symbolism of the various cigarette brands
coloured my fantasies and aspirations and contributed elements to my very
identity in ways that were subtle and powerful, yet virtually invisible at the
time.
I realized this one
insomniac night, while rummaging around in a drawer. I discovered part of a long-forgotten pack of Salem
My mother smoked during
her pregnancy with me and I am convinced I emerged from the womb looking for a
fag. I was born an infant addict, condemned
by regular placental infusions to a childhood of miserable, but mercifully
unconscious, cold turkey. It took me a
full fourteen and a half years to get my next fix.
That first time behind
the barn, when all the other boys were coughing and gagging and turning green
and throwing up, I was in a reverie of deja
vu, having recognized something familiar; knowing that at last I’d found
something that had been missing; something that gave me solace. That black and white image of the rebel
without a cause, slouched in his leather jacket with his hands in his pockets,
with a fag dangling from his lips, played a part too. I know it did.
How was I to know any better,
back in those days, long before the Marlboro Man died of lonely, hacking
emphysema? After all, the iconography of
tobacco was seamlessly woven into the fabric of society. On the back covers of my mother’s Women’s
Day magazines, that I’d leaf through looking for brassiere and corset ads
while sitting on the toilet, there were colour photographs of sincere-looking,
white-coated doctors pausing for a smoke between surgical procedures, with
stethoscopes round their necks and those round, silvery reflector disks with a
hole in centre on their foreheads, telling me that Lucky Strikes would stimulate my heart and circulation. How true, in a way.
And
those Camels, posed in front of
palm trees and the pyramids, and the bearded sailor in the little circle on the
sea-blue packs of Players spoke
to me of romance and distant shores, and brought to mind images of the droopy,
bare-breasted, black women I’d seen in the National Geographic Magazine, beating their millet with mortars
and pestles made from poles and hollowed-out logs.
13.5.12
12.5.12
Continental or Native Vegetarian Breakfast
Pleasure, once I overcame the major influences of Catholicism and it became an end in itself, began, little by little, to take on the qualities of work. Whereas the gratification of forbidden impulses used to arouse guilt, once I’d dealt with those issues, failure to have fun lowered my self-esteem.
I countered with psychic self-improvement. I got in touch with my feelings, I ate healthy, took lessons, immersed myself in the wisdom of the East, learned how to relate, and even overcame guilt and fear at the prospect of pleasure itself. All this came to be measured by standards of achievement, like amateur sport gone professional.
And as if that wasn’t enough, the woman I was with at the time, who was in the habit of answering everything I said by asking, “Are you sure that’s what you meant to say?” was into, of all things, the measurement of sexual performance.
She insisted that satisfaction depended on the acquisition of proper technique and believed that it could be achieved only after disciplined, coordinated effort, practice and study. She had books and diagrams showing the location of the g-spot, and newsletters from the Boston Women’s Collective. It started out quite exciting, but in the end I was just exhausted.
I was finally able to break away and repudiate the rhetoric of achievement when she ran off to an ashram providing group therapy sessions for vegetarians, advocates of free love, and counter-cultural enthusiasts, with herbs and potions and crystals on silver chains, in which the attainment of spiritual wisdom, coming face to face with God Herself, required the emptying of the mind of all preconceived notions.
Spiritual guidance took the form of encouragement to stand and scream at the surf pounding on the beach at Goa . There was massage therapy and aroma therapy and encounter groups, the brochure said, as well as various other facilities to assist catharsis and the search for inner peace, with a choice of single or double occupancy and continental or native vegetarian breakfast.
11.5.12
10.5.12
Chronicle of a Journey to the Dark Side of the Earth: Part 4
Luckless and Unconsidered
Smoke from the burning embassy
district hangs low in the sky. The
presidential palace rises out of the mud, a gaudy display of staircases and
columns and coats of arms, with its pair of bookend armoured personnel carriers
parked back-to-back at the gate facing angry, stone-throwing crowds.
In front of their hovels,
luckless and unconsidered, women cook rice and beans or fry bananas on
smouldering twigs or dung cakes, while their babies mew and crawl and weep,
their tears streaking their dusty faces.
The men rest, fat paunches over waistbands, machine guns propped to one
side, stoned eyes focused on the infinity of despondence, the inherent dignity
of the human person lost in a social landscape that is nothing but a heap of
combustible material, littered with the usual debris; venereal disease,
neglected bastards, piles of un-biodegradable trash, people reduced to despair,
a few people’s privileges paid for by many other people’s work.
One, little more than a girl but
old, seeks and finds her naked scrap of an offspring from the ragged children
with matted hair who are sitting in the dust.
She squats and attaches the child to her nipple. After, she wipes his backside and his snotty
face with the hem of her wrapped skirt and places him back in the dust.
Down the hill, wading and
splashing in the delta streams, older children squeal and shout and grab at the
teats of slovenly, slothful water buffalo, amid a detritus of rusted hulks and
engine blocks and broken bicycles and dirty plastic bags, where only twisted
flowers grow in the morning sunshine filtered through a haze of diesel exhaust.
The teats are covered with a film of the black crankcase oil that slicks the
surface of the river from shore to shore.
They squirt warm milk and burnt fossil hydrocarbons down their eager
throats.
To be continued…
9.5.12
Homo Sapiens: An Illustrated Field Guide
Homo sapiens are uniquely adept at utilizing systems of communication for self-expression. In addition to the exchange of ideas and information through language communication, each cultural tradition has evolved a complex set of non-verbal signals capable of conveying at a glance detailed ideas about identity and ideology.
Some of these culturally evolved signals are almost universally recognizable by all sapiens. They are a sort of communication short cut, rich in information, that function to quickly define the relationship between the recipient and the signaler, making reciprocal behavioral expectations clear to both parties.
8.5.12
Professor Nemesis
Professor Nemesis is obnoxious
even in small doses, but especially so when accompanied by his own
self-aggrandizement and his personal group of sycophants. His academic fame was established back in the day, when he'd finessed a multi-million dollar research grant to come to the conclusion that
people who use television as their primary source of information tend to be
less well informed than people who read newspapers, and that education levels -
he likes the word mediated - have a lot to do with this.
He was on all the talk shows,
even Larry King. His methodology was impeccable,
indeed elegant. I often heard him
bragging about it over the din at lunchtime in the staff canteen, explaining
that the data collection itself was a display of logistics that would have
inspired the heart of any sergeant major.
The world owes a debt of gratitude to Professor Nemesis and this is a
fact that he misses no opportunity to communicate.
Don’t be too quick to accuse
me of bitterness. It’s just that I grew
to know his classroom methods very well.
His main tactics are intimidation and ridicule and he uses both very
liberally and with sadistic skill. He speaks an ugly language, using lots of abstract nouns that activate my spell
checker; nouns like textuality, discursivity, supplementarity, synchronicity,
plurality. At one time or another, I had
every one of his graduate students weeping and snivelling and blowing their
noses into tissues in my office over the burning humiliation they felt in his
presence.
“Why haven’t you read Goffman?” he’d thunder
at them across a silent, anxious seminar table, pointing an accusing finger;
though Goffman wasn’t on the reading list, only things authored, or more
accurately, co-authored with earlier generations of graduate students, by
Nemesis himself.
7.5.12
Ruins of Heliopolis
6.5.12
Sufficient Justification
Long to be free of hunger and rage. Seek to achieve a calm detachment beyond emotion. Outgrow dependence. Eat a balanced diet and brush your teeth after every meal. Cultivate an indifference to life itself. Acknowledge its passing. Take moderate exercise, cook with olive oil, drink a little red wine every day, and stay away from cigarettes and heroin. Be intoxicated with laughter. Let curses dissolve like the evaporation of a nightmare on awakening. Be noble, be strong, be great in heart and be compassionate. Practice forbearance. Give. Ask for nothing. Hope for nothing. Don't be afraid. The will to live is sufficient justification for being alive.
4.5.12
3.5.12
High Art and Low
Consider this music called jazz. With its social and cultural origins among the illiterate and more or less despised and dispossessed African diasporas of the southern American states: brothel pianists, nomadic cotton pickers, watchers of passing trains and steamboats, street-corner guitar players, out-casts and strumpets, it has expanded and evolved to include a cultural community that today cuts across boundaries of age, sex, economic status, vocation, ethnicity and the state. The most vital in the abundance of contemporary music, jazz has become established world-wide as the mother vernacular of urban popular music.
Globally, jazz complements each individual cultural musical tradition by offering a universality that has not become lost in vulgarity and self-reference. More importantly, the value that jazz musicians attach to innovation leads most to hold a view of composition and music history that is truly global in scope. Just as jazz was born in America
In a global cultural landscape in which popular music has become increasingly strident, aggressive and barren, jazz continues to exalt the simple charm of existence without much demand for reflection on the part of the listener. With the music of contemporary high culture becoming progressively rarefied, abstract and minimal, leaving room for only highly sublimated emotions, jazz, by its raw exuberance, brings an element of balance. It is at once both high art and low; the true classical music of the global, post-modern age and also its genuine folk expression; through its various fusions the living, growing, musical incarnation of the global cultural personality, its once oral traditions of generational transmission now accomplished electronically.
If jazz has any purpose, it is a way to discover, to create, and to define a missing part within human beings related to what it means to be human. In this sense, jazz could be called an existentialist art. Jazz musicians create their essence by playing jazz, as both the global classical music of post-modernity and as its folk music.
2.5.12
1.5.12
The Age of Reason
The age of reason was six, we
were told, my first grade classmates and I.
With it came the ability to distinguish evil from good, right from
wrong, and the state of sin from a state of grace. Our baptisms had freed us from the guilt of original
sin, a guilt that even then I wasn’t willing to acknowledge because it wasn’t
fair. Now, through confession and the
Eucharist we would be fully members of the one, true, apostolic and universal
church, unlike the poor, dead, un-baptized African babies who were condemned to
the spiritual and sensory deprivation of Limbo.
While
far away in Moscow , Khrushchev was denouncing
Stalin, and in New York City
We
were told the Mysteries. Ah, the
Mysteries; the Trinity, the Immaculate Conception, the Virgin Birth, the
Resurrection, the Ascension, the tongues of fire and the infallibility of the
Pope. And somehow I began to acquire the
elements of an image of the source of all evil as a large, black, monstrous
apparition with horns on his head, cloven hooves, ass’s ears, claws, fiery
eyes, gnashing teeth, a huge phallus and a sulphurous smell. All this before the Second Vatican Council,
when the priest turned around and started speaking English instead of Latin and
we were told not to say Holy Ghost anymore, it was Spirit, Holy Spirit, because
we didn’t believe in ghosts.
30.4.12
29.4.12
Chronicle of a Journey to the Dark Side of the Earth: Part 3
Mother Country or Fatherland?
Hard times, confusing times, no
warnings, times of war. Portents of
ending. Intimations of catastrophe. Holocaust guilt, nuclear annihilation, the
depletion of the ozone, the tigers, the whales, and the spotted owls.
Boredom, weariness,
repetitiveness, kept waiting in an outer office, unrelenting crankiness,
nagging falsity, insufferable predictability.
There must be more than this. The
price of oil is computed in two currencies, dollars and blood, and payments in
both must be made in instalments.
Life is a series of arrangements and adjustments within which the
consequence of error is total disaster. The
only safe assumption is that what one is doing is probably wrong. Red in tooth and claw, the world is
monumentally foolish, sadistically violent, repulsively corrupt and insanely
alive. Much of it is devoid of history
and any notion of collective social context.
Sweltering boredom first, and then the anxiety of impending disaster,
alternate as moment to moment concerns.
There are no-go areas where it is
dangerous to belong to the wrong ethnic group, where they will cut off your
finger to get the ring. There are bearded
gunmen on the streets now, backed by portraits 20 feet high of Khomeini and the
martyrs Beheshti and Chamran. Ayatollah
Montazeri looks scornfully from a hoarding, Hussein himself from another, the
Twelfth Imam, his horses oozing blood amid the carnage on the fields of
Kerbala. At the check points they ask
whether you come from a mother country or a fatherland.
To be continued...
To be continued...
28.4.12
Homo Sapiens: An Illustrated Field Guide
Beginning roughly ten thousand years ago, having wiped out most of the world's megafauna, fully anatomically modern Homo sapiens began to domesticate some of the various plant and animal species with which they found themselves sharing the environment.
The transition to the so-called Neolithic and the dawn of agriculture laid the social and economic foundations for the emergence of civilization and led to highly complex and varied relationships between sapiens and all the other animal species globally.
To be continued...
Ruins of Hiroshima
Even with hindsight it’s impossible
to be sure whether the use of the bombs over Hiroshima
and Nagasaki
led to the post-war nuclear arms race or whether the bombs demonstrated their
horror in a way that no harmless experiment could ever have done, and so helped
to hold the ultimate violence in check throughout the Cold War.
20.4.12
The Long Run
Think of time. Once it was a cycle of agricultural events, of birth, of death and the unfolding of God’s will. Now it ticks away in units of money; in bank notes and per diems, weekly wages, monthly salaries, mortgage payments, half-yearly dividends, annual raises and bonuses, superannuation pensions, perpetual stock and, eventually, in units of that redemptive eternity which economists call the long run.
19.4.12
18.4.12
No Thanks, Just Looking
The girl they offered me, for 1,200 baht, was exquisite and just 14 years old, so they said. It was her first day on the job, and she was special, they said. But when our eyes met, the only possible form of communication, since neither one of us spoke a single word that the other understood; I could see that she was badly frightened.
The perceptive madam pointed her long red fingernail toward another girl gyrating naked on the elevated bar who looked a few years older. Perhaps I’d prefer somebody with a little more experience for the same price, she suggested.
Behind us on a flood-lit stage, a naked couple, looking bored and distracted, went through the motions of sex like a pair of trained animals. A drunken crowd of eager voyeurs milled about and cheered the more exotic positions. Blunt negotiations were taking place all around me.
When it became clear I wasn’t a customer, a group of muscular bouncers moved in and extorted 50 times the going rate for the beer I’d ordered. I swiftly found myself back in the river of degradation that flows through Patpong Road .
17.4.12
Digital Faces & Postmodern Social Landscapes
The Night Doctor
Manipulated photography, nothing more, nothing less.
29.3.12
Pausing for a Smoke
I’d been riding in the first of a four-truck convoy full of soldiers down the Pan American Highway out of the capital in the dry January heat. We’d left at dawn, headed for Morazan to confront the forces of the insurrection. I’d been snapping off-to-war shots for a story, joshing and jostling with the macho teenagers in the back of the truck, trying to make sure that their rifles pointed skyward and not inadvertently at me, laughing at their jokes as they passed around water bottles and surreptitious joints, when we turned off onto a dusty track and stopped so that everyone could take a leak by the side of the road.
I leaped down and peed with everybody else but when the smokes were passed around and everyone lit up, I declined, “no quiero, gracias,” and took in a big whiff of the dried-out pine and tamarind that was hanging in the dusty air amid the hibiscus blossoms and the bougainvillea and the shiny, green banana leaves, and told myself it’d been almost six months and I was clean. And while I could see the satisfaction it produced for those teenage boys sucking on those fags, I reminded myself of the misery I’d gone through to get this far, and that it’d been worth it, and that it wouldn’t be worth it to have to go through it all again.
For some reason the first truck set off without me and I climbed into the second, with its identical cargo of armed adolescents. We hadn’t gone very far, grinding along the rutted roadway in low gear, slapped by overhanging branches, jolted and bruised, when the first truck hit an anti-tank mine buried in the dust and instantly disintegrated in a spectacular ball of flame and noise that cut every living one of those boys into seared and singed chunks about the size of a Sunday roast, and sent a splattering of blood and pieces over us like a brief, warm hail storm.
In the contemplative sadness that follows sudden, cosmic fear, in the stunned, stupefied, ear-ringing deafness of the aftermath, I watched mesmerized as the boy beside me slowly and meticulously extracted a knitting needle-sized splinter of human bone which was embedded an inch in his forearm like an arrow, and then, sucking at the oozing wound, offered me a Winston from the red and white pack he fished out of the baggy pocket on the thigh of his camouflage fatigues. I accepted, and was immediately hooked again.
27.3.12
25.3.12
Chronicle of a Journey to the Dark Side of the Earth: Part 2
The Fragrance of Flowers and the Subtleties of Love
The sky is overcast with frozen industrial pollution and the air is grey and gritty with blowing coal dust. In silent, resigned determination, an endless stream of cyclists, bundled against the Manchurian blasts, pedal the socialist bike lane under portraits of their Chairman, Great Leader, Dear Leader, their heads bowed, exhaling plumes of frosty breath. Pumping up and down, their calf muscles flex rhythmically under the layers of rayon long-johns under their pathetic cotton trousers, the chill benevolence of the oxymoronic people's democratic dictatorship. Profound depression is the dominant emotion, the goal of socialism justifying whatever means, however cruel, might be necessary to achieve an upstairs and a downstairs, indoor plumbing, enough to eat, electric lights and a telephone.
The whole truth has still not been told. Beauty passes by unrecognized in the bike lane. One by one, the individual faces in the passing multitude spark a torrent of associations. Looking carefully and with some sensitivity we can perceive a mad montage pieced together from the shards of living memory.
Here's the first image: A damp and vaguely pleasant humus smell permeates a jade green landscape enchanted with bird song, the distant hilltops fading into a mist as subtle as an innuendo. And then, a sudden immensity of dirty coal lies under a banshee wind in a landscape where the brick chimneys of foundries belch smoke and soot and people are bent and misshapen, numb to blowing grit and sleet, and impervious to the fragrance of flowers and the subtleties of love.
To be continued…
8.3.12
Homo Sapiens: An Illustrated Field Guide
The tendency toward a relatively long survival after menopause in the life cycle of the sapiens female is thought by anthropologists to be an evolutionary adaptation allowing more resources to be allocated to the nurture and protection of the young, who are born helpless and take many years to reach maturity.
The acquisition of language early in its evolutionary history, also an evolutionary adaptation, allows Homo sapiens to pass both practical skills and cultural information across time and to accumulate such skills and information down the generations.
To be continued..
Ruins of Ephesus
This tiny fragment of marble (8cm) has a story to tell.
Our story takes place in
The façade of the ancient library still greets visitors today. As do the remains of the public baths across the street, featuring an outer courtyard latrine surrounded by marble benches, under which water ran to flush away the waste. Musicians are said to have performed on a platform under a colonnade in the centre of the courtyard to entertain the people as they went about their business, (so to speak).
You guessed it. This fragment was once part of that very toilet seat.
Also to be seen in
This is clearly the official doctrine of the Catholic Church. Why else would the current Pope say, on his very first foreign trip, undertaken to Turkey, on November 29, 2008:
"From here in Ephesus, a city blessed by the presence of Mary Most Holy, who we know is loved and venerated also by Muslims, let us lift up to the Lord a special prayer for peace between peoples."
It is my contention that this fragment may well be a priceless holy relic.
After all, what can the Virgin have done with her time between the Ascension and her own Assumption? I suspect she must have availed herself of the wondrous library. And when nature called, she must have slipped across to the public toilet, where this fragment of marble, attached as it was to the rest of the seat at the time, almost certainly must have come into contact with the immaculate backside.
Ephesus dwindled and was eventually abandoned in the 15th century as its port silted up and its trade access failed.
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