What a wonderfully flat title. It imparts factual information (telling you of the day and the date), without hinting at anything within the body of the post. Yet that is just the point. For once, I am writing as I need to. Writing as I used to. I have no game-plan, no conclusion.
I cannot seem to accept myself as I am. I realised the other day that in many ways, I am a desperately lonely individual. I am that 'ivory-tower intellectual,' although of course, I'm not because life is more complex (read: nuanced) than that. I have the humility and apprehensiveness of a religious person trying to live in adherence with a detailed religious code - without the certainty of a Supreme Being. 'Believe, then,' you might say. 'You did once, you can do it again.' I'm not sure if belief and obedience are the same thing. I'm not sure if a desire for stability and genuine religious devotion are the same thing at all. I think it would do the genuinely-devoted a real disservice to claim that they are.
Everyone reads. Even people who boast of never reading a book, or having read very little in their lives, read to some extent. You can't help it now, can you? I read, like a thirsty little sapling drinking in all it can get, when I was younger. A very strange mix - abridged Reader's Digest novels, autobiographies, the Reader's Digests themselves, books for my own age-group, pizza leaflets, recipe cards... If it came under my nose, I would read it. Family (my cousin in particular) compared me to Roald Dahl's Matilda. I always smiled uncomfortably. Keen to learn and imaginative, yes. Child prodigy, no.
That desire to learn, when not checked by the pervasion of specialist jargon (or for that matter, any sort of foreknowledge) or the presence of complicated mathematical figures, has never left me. I still trawl sections of the Internet for articles, for blogposts, in short for literature. I don't get to read as much as I'd like to these days; obsessively swallowing large quantities of text and then being pressed to produce focussed critical analysis at a rate of knots can really leave a bad taste in the mouth. The terror of enjoying a book, and then finding my brain mechanically deconstructing it afterwards, makes the pursuit of reading more complicated than it ought to be.
So yeah, I read a lot of stuff on the Internet. Lest we forget, the Internet is a communicative rather than an educative medium, and so much of what I read is accompanied by comments from ''readers.'' I put that in inverted commas because what strikes me, especially when reading things on Comment is free, but also occasionally on Liberal Conspiracy and Pickled Politics - never mind on other sites - is how little people actually seem able to 'read' now. The smooth and steady process of information does not appear to be happening. What actually happens is reaction. Lots and lots of it. Even those who think they are being witty very rarely are and are simply indulging in smartarsery that brings to mind the big-mouthed kid in the playground who wants everyone to agree how funny he/she is.
To return to what I was saying, I've discovered a new motive hiding away, like a stow-away, alongside my desire to learn. It is a desire for companionship, for agreement - in short for community. My loneliness is amplified by being a solitary individual by nature. I also have an intense need for guidance (being young and confused) which sits uneasily with a distrust of dogma and diktats. I don't distrust authority per se, but I have an absolute horror of groups. This comes from being an 'outsider' within the most prominent group of my life - my family.
So of course, I'm trying to resolve all those paradoxes by creating a new one: finding other 'slippery fish.' Other people like me, who are almost a walking 'stream of consciousness' in themselves. I feel a sense of spiritual kinship with some people I read, people I don't even know, sometimes. I may never meet them, I may not even agree with them completely. Nonetheless, they reassure me that I'm not totally alone. The world is changing, and when I find another, in search of nothing quite so grandiose as truth - just in search of honesty - I feel safer. I am no longer just part of the present, and I sincerely hope that all the knobs who co-opt the writings of others, to grandstand and ridicule them, will become part of the past in time. To them, all I can say is: you don't know everything. Nobody does. I don't. The sooner we halt this ridiculous trend of pretending we all know all there is to know, the better. As Forster wrote, 'Only connect.'
Reading is that most wonderfully paradoxical of things: a private communication. You are inheriting histories, facts, opinions, fears - in short, the distillation of a person when you read, particularly when you read fiction (given that fiction has more room for the personal and the subjective). That is why I find it so ludicrous the way the majority of people respond to articles. They deny the communication. They simply seek space to posture (funny that a lot of them seem to be rather unreconstructed males). It's a World Wide Web, you fools. Not a clean, linear Tube network. Yet even a Tube network goes in both directions.
So a paradox is what frees me, ultimately. Pinning down my thoughts to the (web)page frees me. I read, committing myself to the thoughts of another, to escape. A private pursuit offers me companionship, offers me freedom. And hell, if I like the 'look' of you (and you don't live abroad...), I'll stalk you and make you my friend (just ask Ala...) Scared? You should be.
Showing posts with label universal truths. Show all posts
Showing posts with label universal truths. Show all posts
Monday, April 13, 2009
Monday, December 29, 2008
In Praise of The Inner Life
This is rather a random, off-the-peg post that has just been inspired by my ongoing 'discussion' with Derek, over 'moral relativism', 'universal truths', 'universal values' and other such fancy-schmancy terms of which I vaguely have the outlines of an understanding. (Apologies Derek, I have been attempting to link to your blog, but Blogger gets rather unhappy about it and repeatedly refuses to let me... aha... HA! TAKE THAT! TAKE THAT! *metaphorically bounces up and down in TRIUMPH*).
Ridiculous and out-of-touch though it is going to sound (which is pretty bloody impressive considering that I am 21!), I am going to proceed to rip the shit out of the sort of people who commit honour killings. Not just those people either, but the other people who embody the various degrees leading up to the committing of such atrocities on the scale of fuckwittery.
Now, we all care what people think of us to some extent. That's part of the whole fucking deal of being yuman. We measure ourselves against other beings, and this has led to a lot of grief and schadenfreude, but it is also useful because it helps us set a (ideally) universal standard of What Is Not Acceptable. Unfortunately, this standard isn't really universal, which is why ancient taboos like incest and paedophilia still persist and why fucking honour killings happen in the first place.
Now, I know this is no solution and I'm perfectly aware that this will make me sound like an ivory-tower intellectual, but I don't care. It has to be said. I am going to speak in praise of the inner life.
The 'inner life' as I understand it, is the kind of thing championed by the likes of E.M Forster and Marcel Proust. Might I just take this opportunity to state that I have slagged off Forster here before, for which I apologise, but y'know, Howards End is pretty dense. It is also absolutely amazing. Mummy, when I grow up, I want to be E.M Forster! Er... without the homosexual upper/middle-class white male thing, of course. I've neither the money nor the time for that kind of operation ;-D.
So yeah, anyway, the 'inner life' basically involves the individual taking time to reflect on themselves and the world, maybe even seeking to make sense of a post-God world through art, and generally refusing to see and depict the world in a simple way, even if they lean towards a simplistic view themselves. Howards End is full of certain conservative leanings and idealistic tendencies that make me scoff 'Bullshit,' but it also recognises the inherent complexity of life. That, for me, makes it more than worthy of forgiveness and gives it its rightly-deserved masterpiece status. Proust and HE both acknowledge the vital importance of art and culture to life.
People sneer at these kinds of attitudes, especially in a world where there is so much poverty and studying medicine is much more likely to earn you cash than studying English. However, I feel that we are increasingly obsessed with material things these days. I'm not making a conservative value-judgement, I'm just saying how it seems to me. I can't - and wouldn't - speak for the past. When I say material, I don't just mean that we are hugely consumerist (we are!) but also that we're increasingly obsessed with the tangible.
No doubt people who've chatted with me before might have heard this from me already - I think that our culture is very visually-oriented. To give you an idea of what I'm on about, the culture of Elizabethan England was more orally-centred, being as it was a time of Shakespeare, mass-theatre and no TVs. Again, I am not exercising any judgements here - I wouldn't dare. I am simply chronicling what appears to me to be a cultural development.
This movement towards the visual is good in the sense that it demands that information be made more concise, clear and direct than ever before, which is no bad thing. However - ironically enough - this is also in some ways a downside. I often feel that because this demand comes alongside an ever-apparent awareness that there is so much going on out there that we don't know and don't understand, we end up in a dangerous position.
Overwhelmed by the sheer volume of knowledge out there, crying out for understanding, people bury themselves further in what they already know. And what they already know, subconsciously, is that visual images are quicker and easier to process than words. So, they whip out their gossip magazines (to provide one example...!) and lose themselves in the blown-up photos of unfortunate, mostly-female celebrities accompanied by tiny, almost incidental captions. I really do not think that that is an accident, btw. They know what people want, and they're going to give it to them.
Hence people bury themselves in the obvious, in the visible, and in doing so, they ostracise themselves from the 'inner life.' The inquisitivity of youth gives way to the fear and cynicism of age, and a feeling that the world is both a) moving faster than it used to and b) moving too fast for you to keep up with. DON'T LOSE YOURSELF TO IT!
Culture is the only way we can be saved from this. People need to be made to think - and I'm aware that sounds dictatorial, but I don't care. When people stop questioning, they start digging in firmly to their 'hand-me-down' beliefs (I know I've used that phrase already, and FYI, it isn't even my coinage!). They begin to vaunt tradition, and then we have a problem.
This is the problem with the sort of people who commit honour killings. They have no inner life at all. They simply inhale the bigotry of tradition handed to them, trying to create a viable identity for themselves out of the processes of fear and denial. These people take huge pride in their 'communities', as well they would. They are parasites! Separate them from their communities and they would perish, because all they are is a lower order of being, mere chimps who have programmed themselves with the guiding fist of tradition, to replicate, replicate, replicate.
These people's entire sense of self depends on how they are seen by others. They are paper beings, no real substance existing beyond the crumbs of meaning that their pathetic, trembling paws have grabbed from the mouths of others and crammed into the huge hole where a personality and a sense of self should be. Such cogs are they that they perceive the individuality of others, even of their own children as a shaming. It IS a shaming, it is a shaming of you BECAUSE YOU ARE NOTHING. You have no individuality, and this realisation of the whole mechanism, of all the other identikit cogs is your life. When you see somebody else who is threatening to escape the mechanism, who doesn't need to be a cog, your pathetic, pathetic rage and jealousy spills out until it consumes them.
I could have anyone try and justify these people to me - but wait! How dare I call them 'people'? They are murderers who have no humanity; mere automatons for whom the merest TOUCH of humanity will derail their sense of self. Snuff the spark! their Cyberman-instincts cry. It threatens me, so it must die! How DARE they try and use the excuse of 'honour'? How DARE they try and pass selfishness off as mere self-consciousness?
Then, just to rub the salt in that little bit further, they fucking well try and use religion to justify their deeds. FUCKOFF, you arrogant fucking hypocritical self-deluded bastards. It is God's right, and God's right only, to pass judgement on an individual's actions like that. Certainly not yours, and CERTAINLY not yours to choose to take the life. How fucking arrogant can you get?
The absolute worst thing for me is that many of the men who commit these atrocities do so without the knowledge or approval of their wives - so despite half the genetic material rightfully belonging to the wife (if we're going to be disgustingly crude), that being which is a part of both parents gets snuffed out regardless.
Murder is never acceptable, whatever the motive behind it, but the way these people try to bring a moral sanction to what they do means that honour killings leave a particularly bad taste in the moral mouth. Psychopaths who kill complete strangers for money are bad enough, but to add in that colossal betrayal of trust... Vah, vah. Bohat changa kita. Or, for those of you who don't speak Punjabi, 'Wow. Very well done.'
To quote (and possibly paraphrase?) one of my favourite Hindi songs ever: 'Insaan bano / Duniya se chale jayo' - 'Behave like men / Leave this world and be gone.'
(On a lighter note, how the hell did I end up with four followers and 880 profile views?!).
Ridiculous and out-of-touch though it is going to sound (which is pretty bloody impressive considering that I am 21!), I am going to proceed to rip the shit out of the sort of people who commit honour killings. Not just those people either, but the other people who embody the various degrees leading up to the committing of such atrocities on the scale of fuckwittery.
Now, we all care what people think of us to some extent. That's part of the whole fucking deal of being yuman. We measure ourselves against other beings, and this has led to a lot of grief and schadenfreude, but it is also useful because it helps us set a (ideally) universal standard of What Is Not Acceptable. Unfortunately, this standard isn't really universal, which is why ancient taboos like incest and paedophilia still persist and why fucking honour killings happen in the first place.
Now, I know this is no solution and I'm perfectly aware that this will make me sound like an ivory-tower intellectual, but I don't care. It has to be said. I am going to speak in praise of the inner life.
The 'inner life' as I understand it, is the kind of thing championed by the likes of E.M Forster and Marcel Proust. Might I just take this opportunity to state that I have slagged off Forster here before, for which I apologise, but y'know, Howards End is pretty dense. It is also absolutely amazing. Mummy, when I grow up, I want to be E.M Forster! Er... without the homosexual upper/middle-class white male thing, of course. I've neither the money nor the time for that kind of operation ;-D.
So yeah, anyway, the 'inner life' basically involves the individual taking time to reflect on themselves and the world, maybe even seeking to make sense of a post-God world through art, and generally refusing to see and depict the world in a simple way, even if they lean towards a simplistic view themselves. Howards End is full of certain conservative leanings and idealistic tendencies that make me scoff 'Bullshit,' but it also recognises the inherent complexity of life. That, for me, makes it more than worthy of forgiveness and gives it its rightly-deserved masterpiece status. Proust and HE both acknowledge the vital importance of art and culture to life.
People sneer at these kinds of attitudes, especially in a world where there is so much poverty and studying medicine is much more likely to earn you cash than studying English. However, I feel that we are increasingly obsessed with material things these days. I'm not making a conservative value-judgement, I'm just saying how it seems to me. I can't - and wouldn't - speak for the past. When I say material, I don't just mean that we are hugely consumerist (we are!) but also that we're increasingly obsessed with the tangible.
No doubt people who've chatted with me before might have heard this from me already - I think that our culture is very visually-oriented. To give you an idea of what I'm on about, the culture of Elizabethan England was more orally-centred, being as it was a time of Shakespeare, mass-theatre and no TVs. Again, I am not exercising any judgements here - I wouldn't dare. I am simply chronicling what appears to me to be a cultural development.
This movement towards the visual is good in the sense that it demands that information be made more concise, clear and direct than ever before, which is no bad thing. However - ironically enough - this is also in some ways a downside. I often feel that because this demand comes alongside an ever-apparent awareness that there is so much going on out there that we don't know and don't understand, we end up in a dangerous position.
Overwhelmed by the sheer volume of knowledge out there, crying out for understanding, people bury themselves further in what they already know. And what they already know, subconsciously, is that visual images are quicker and easier to process than words. So, they whip out their gossip magazines (to provide one example...!) and lose themselves in the blown-up photos of unfortunate, mostly-female celebrities accompanied by tiny, almost incidental captions. I really do not think that that is an accident, btw. They know what people want, and they're going to give it to them.
Hence people bury themselves in the obvious, in the visible, and in doing so, they ostracise themselves from the 'inner life.' The inquisitivity of youth gives way to the fear and cynicism of age, and a feeling that the world is both a) moving faster than it used to and b) moving too fast for you to keep up with. DON'T LOSE YOURSELF TO IT!
Culture is the only way we can be saved from this. People need to be made to think - and I'm aware that sounds dictatorial, but I don't care. When people stop questioning, they start digging in firmly to their 'hand-me-down' beliefs (I know I've used that phrase already, and FYI, it isn't even my coinage!). They begin to vaunt tradition, and then we have a problem.
This is the problem with the sort of people who commit honour killings. They have no inner life at all. They simply inhale the bigotry of tradition handed to them, trying to create a viable identity for themselves out of the processes of fear and denial. These people take huge pride in their 'communities', as well they would. They are parasites! Separate them from their communities and they would perish, because all they are is a lower order of being, mere chimps who have programmed themselves with the guiding fist of tradition, to replicate, replicate, replicate.
These people's entire sense of self depends on how they are seen by others. They are paper beings, no real substance existing beyond the crumbs of meaning that their pathetic, trembling paws have grabbed from the mouths of others and crammed into the huge hole where a personality and a sense of self should be. Such cogs are they that they perceive the individuality of others, even of their own children as a shaming. It IS a shaming, it is a shaming of you BECAUSE YOU ARE NOTHING. You have no individuality, and this realisation of the whole mechanism, of all the other identikit cogs is your life. When you see somebody else who is threatening to escape the mechanism, who doesn't need to be a cog, your pathetic, pathetic rage and jealousy spills out until it consumes them.
I could have anyone try and justify these people to me - but wait! How dare I call them 'people'? They are murderers who have no humanity; mere automatons for whom the merest TOUCH of humanity will derail their sense of self. Snuff the spark! their Cyberman-instincts cry. It threatens me, so it must die! How DARE they try and use the excuse of 'honour'? How DARE they try and pass selfishness off as mere self-consciousness?
Then, just to rub the salt in that little bit further, they fucking well try and use religion to justify their deeds. FUCKOFF, you arrogant fucking hypocritical self-deluded bastards. It is God's right, and God's right only, to pass judgement on an individual's actions like that. Certainly not yours, and CERTAINLY not yours to choose to take the life. How fucking arrogant can you get?
The absolute worst thing for me is that many of the men who commit these atrocities do so without the knowledge or approval of their wives - so despite half the genetic material rightfully belonging to the wife (if we're going to be disgustingly crude), that being which is a part of both parents gets snuffed out regardless.
Murder is never acceptable, whatever the motive behind it, but the way these people try to bring a moral sanction to what they do means that honour killings leave a particularly bad taste in the moral mouth. Psychopaths who kill complete strangers for money are bad enough, but to add in that colossal betrayal of trust... Vah, vah. Bohat changa kita. Or, for those of you who don't speak Punjabi, 'Wow. Very well done.'
To quote (and possibly paraphrase?) one of my favourite Hindi songs ever: 'Insaan bano / Duniya se chale jayo' - 'Behave like men / Leave this world and be gone.'
(On a lighter note, how the hell did I end up with four followers and 880 profile views?!).
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