As any fule kno, the um, 'situation' with the Gaza Strip and Israel has provoked a lot of what I can only term sheer utter fucking lunacy everywhere. Pop along to Pickled Politics and scroll down a little to marvel at the sheer volume of articles on it; or if you're a rubbernecking connoisseur, wade into the brain-rotting depths of personal insults and virulent misunderstandings and misinterpretations that tend to make up the comment threads of such articles. Sheesh. I have heard several times how mental people go over I/P, but to see it in action is really something else. Some brave commenters, such as one douglas clark, ventured to say that British Jews should not be forced to shoulder the responsibility of Israel's actions and expected to 'make everything right' from a tiny island far away (I paraphrase). Now, that seems like common sense, don' it?
It got me thinking again on how so much of the danger that comes from having a religious identity (as far as I'm concerned) is in that symbolism. I'm far too timid to say anything like that the world should be rid of religion; I like to throw up my hands on these matters and say, I don't know, and if pressed, I could give you an answer, but not a simple one. I can't ever see myself becoming famous because I don't on the whole do snappy soundbites or 'big ideas' - but back to religious symbolism. It scares me because it allows, nay in many cases, demands the establishment of a connection of oneself with a much larger body of people. The way I see it, many people 'get into' religion for the community and stay for the God (forgive me if that sounds very cynical, and just to elaborate, I'm talking here about the things that keep people born within religion within it, but especially of those who leave and 'come back' or those who enter for the first time...).
Now that is all very edifying and so forth, but it becomes hugely problematic when you start to think about what this means. What it means, as I see it, is a declaration by the individual of surrender to a collective, over certain things and at certain times. In short, it's like hazing or any sort of unpleasant club membership, and even if you were BORN with those privileges, you never know when the tide of mass opinion might turn against you. Hence, though more shored-up than the new convert, you're still forever at risk of being undermined by the very fact of your 'membership', paradoxical as it sounds.
(Might I just say how painfully paradoxical this strikes me as? A significant part of the promise of religion to many is as an access of ready-made identity, culture, history, yadda yadda yadda... and instead it gets to the stage where you're always having to prove yourself. Well, I guess as the popular maxim goes, in life, nothing (but nothing) is free!).
Now, it must be averred that this risk of being undermined is not always greatly present. It tends to emerge handily with the arrival of an Other. I suppose the process works something like this: your 'identity' and 'culture' are threatened, hence you are threatened; by aggressively reasserting these, you refuse the attempt of the Other to undermine you completely. However, as we have already established, this shadowy Other (which may not be as much of a threat as imagined to be, who knows?) will then become projected unconsciously upon your fellow-believers for whom you must perform the rituals of belief. Isn't it ungracious? Isn't it undignified, how the best and brightest of us find ourselves bending the knee before those we know, know, in our hearts and minds to be stupid, ugly, and generally inferior... and yet whom the deranged reach of (oft-bigoted) zeal places on the podium, above us?
I commented disparagingly on a thread about a Sikh 'holocaust' museum, saying that I don't think the word should be bandied about quite so readily. Aye right, I fuckin' don't - the word means 'burnt sacrifice' and was applied to the full horror of the Nazi plan (need I really mention the gas chambers here...?) in light of the specificity of how this plan was implemented. I am a writer; I have the most enormous respect for words and it really annoys me when people don't use them properly, or use them out of context. Fuck you if you think that's precious - you wouldn't say the same of someone like Ben Goldacre seeking to debunk bad science now, would you? Miscommunication, apart from when it's deliberate, has a lot to do with making our lives harder than they ought to be, and the misuse of language is one of those things. Call the suffering of other minority communities 'genocide', call it 'mass murder' - but given how saturated this word has become with meaning - and that too after a prolonged effort by History not to let us forget such an awful happening - don't go bandying it about. Especially when the events in question are lacking in the same scale, type of mass-murder and specificity of evil intent.
(Rumbold helpfully intervened to explain what I was saying before I even could myself, so I have left no further comment 'pon that thread. Please head over to Charlie Brooker to see, fully and perfectly expressed, how I ultimately feel about Internet 'debates'. Ta for that Rumbold, true to form you put it rather clearer and more polite than I probably would've managed... comment threads often fill me with impotent rage, and then I feel dirty, as if I've just rubbed myself all over with The Daily Mail, and vow to do something REAL when my degree is over).
To return to the point - I can't help thinking that such things happening - such ridiculous abuses of language and over-aggressiveness - come, because with things like I/P, people's 'imagined' ancestry begins to come to the fore. Hello, trouble. The collective, baying for blood, seeks its recompense of the individual - now is the time to prove yourself, Sonny Jim! Now show your ideological colours! Lo, and so it comes to pass that people in Great Britain set about each other from the screens of their computers over something which is happening far, far away and to which they are not (short of having relatives in Gaza or Israel) directly connected. I mean, ffs, the link between Jews and Israel is imagined and symbolic, just as the link between Muslims and Muslims in Gaza is imagined and symbolic. Why do you suddenly feel the need to multiply yourself into a fucking representative of your whole religion? Because your people are being attacked here - your people, that's who! Jayzus.
I think here of all the times in the past that I have been forced to say things that I don't believe and agree with statements I find abominable in order to avoid attracting my family's negative attentions. I did it up to a certain age, and then I realised that I didn't have to any more. I could use the power of silence against them. They could infer what they wanted from it; I would not agree, and having got in serious grief on past occasions, I would not condemn either. If this was a coward's way out, I didn't care. My objective was to protect myself and to emerge intact.
My mother has made the observation in the past - very accurate, I feel - that it is only wealthy, middle-class people who have the time to dwell on these things. While this is not entirely true (I'm sure there have been some suicide bombers who weren't fairly financially stable too - or does that only fuel my mum's theory, in implying that poverty only added to ideological frenzy?), there is a LOT of truth to it. While discussing things is all very well and good, I often feel that if you are going to spit blood so, then why the heck don't you get off your arse and do something to help directly? Complain to the BBC, give money to the DEC, hell, fly out there and do something. Just spare me the bitching, and the soapbox-ing, which begin frankly to dive towards unsettling levels of moralisation and dogma, for me. A minority of disenfranchised people will, inevitably, react badly to the injustices that have befallen them - but since when was stooping to that level acceptable? What of all the other people who just want to fucking get by? Like me, they're more concerned with survival rather than ideology. Life is hard enough 'secular' as it is.
Religious fraternity and perspective is not enough when terrible things like this happen. People must remember that we are all ultimately human and that ultimately all the vitriol begets no solutions and no progress. Of course, there are always those who profit from such quarrels, but if people learn to practise a bit more forgiveness and a bit more forgetting, hopefully the planet can proceed on to the future.
Just to bore you senseless a little further, all this really churned about in my brain like clothes in the washing machine when my mum read to me a hilarious, and I fully believe, fictional account of a Sikh wedding (in two parts) from a Punjabi newspaper. Apparently in the duration of this story, some 'sensible observer' remarked how there were far too many women at weddings these days; if you went to the marriage palaces, all you would see was women, and that in the old days, women weren't even meant to be part of the baraat (the wedding procession, otherwise understood as the arrival of the groom and his party at the marriage venue). I immediately stiffened, my brain standing to attention like a guitar-string being pulled taut. My mater had not noticed this; nor did she notice the sudden, emergent incongruity of this remark peeking its ugly, goblin little head from the narrative.
As I glanced idly at the sheet she was holding out before her, a dim sort of epiphany set in. I tilted my head, casually covering the sheet with my gaze - yup. I rolled back my memory to previous glimpses of this paper (I think it must have been the Punjabi section of The Sikh times) - yup. The overwhelming majority of the participants in this production were male, bearded, turbanned and for the most part, pretty old (late 30s onwards). There were women (or there was one I knew of definitely, anyway) in the English part of the paper, but the only columnist I could think of, Rupi Gohlar, was consigned unfussily to a slim, 6cm-wide column somewhere near the entertainment section, which, if I was not looking for it, I would have likely failed to notice (first couple of times, I did miss it).
(To any Private Eye Readers, I appeal to you to recall the E.J. Thribb column. Do you see it now, in your mind? Yes, that's very much what her column resembles, in its slender insignificance. I am struggling now to recall if there are actually any female stalwarts besides Rupi).
I continued to take in what was being read to me, almost laughing at the right moments, but inside I vibrated with epiphany spreading, like the opening of a curtain admits more sunshine. Had I not, upon viewing Channel Punjab, only ever viewed the blurry outlines of women stereotypically 'dancing in the fields' (or had I imagined that too?) and consigned to women-only programmes such as Trinjhan (as far as I know it, a women's talkshow where they had writers and so forth on)? Other than that, women abounded only in the horribly cheap Star-Plus knock-off soaps, where a stereotypical mother-in-law bitch-from-hell would try to undo her stereotypically butter-wouldn't-melt daughter-in-law. Things might be complicated by the arrival of, or transformation of the latter into, a stereotypically gold-digging Westernised 'un-woman'.
I cast about in desperation, but the awareness was glaring me in the face. This was simply not me! None of these were me, and a slow, snakelike rage bubbled luxuriously in my veins. To think that all my life I had been told - had it insisted upon to me - that this was the right and the true, the tradition in which I belonged! I had grown up thinking that Punjabi culture and Sikh culture were one and the same. As I delved into Sikh history, I became much more conscious of the guiding principles of that religion, and as I began to find out more about Punjabi culture - through talking to people other than my parents - cracks began to appear. I discovered that Punjabis had a reputation for being big drinkers and loving fried chicken (that'd explain our local high street then, I tell you...) and, above all else, I began to notice the almost obsessive and deranged sense of male privilege that underscored Punjabi society. I suspect this went something like this: Punjabi men, being among the tallest, strongest and fairest-skinned in India (remember how colour-conscious India is!) were not only superior to women as it is taken for granted that men always are in Indian culture, but also superior to other Indian men! Hence they had extra entitlement!
The fact that the Punjab abounded with rich landowners whose sense of self-worth was only further pumped by laying claim to the glories of Sikh military history won't have helped. And so it came to pass that I watched Long Da Lishkara (a cult Punjabi film made the year before I was born) with my family, I think around the age of 11 or 12. I had not understood the obsession, in some films, with showing women jumping into wells. My young brain established that this must be for them to kill themselves - but why were they killing themselves? The screen soon brought me the answer.
A turbanned, well-dressed man - a man with a neat beard and moustache, and a fair complexion, almost like my own father - was holding a tumbler of whisky. I knew not the name of it, but by the shape and design of the glass, and by the colour of the liquid it housed, could discern what it was. I was horrified. Here was, to all intents and purposes, a Sikh man taking alcohol. Did he not realise it was forbidden? I was to be more horrified still, however, as he advanced upon the servant tidying the room. He seemed delighted by her; she was terrified. He continued to advance on her, I think breaking the glass, if I remember correctly to further frighten her, with his wrath. He managed to trap her on the bed somehow, her horrified shrieks and pleas for mercy only irritating him. Though the next part was obviously absent and left unelaborated upon, my precocious mind made sense of it. He had raped her, and she killed herself for having borne an illegitimate daughter.
My brain struggled. So the stereotypes were true, then? Punjabis were capable not only of drink, but of roundly disregarding the respect for women and acknowledgement of their equal status that lay at the heart of Sikhi? My world was painfully jolted. A man attired, as I said, not unlike my father, had committed a grievous crime against a woman who was, both socially and physically (I was sensitive to the former fact too!) as his female servant (and an Indian woman, thus hardly practised in self-defence) at his, the rich male landowner's, mercy. He had refused her his mercy. He had used her, and then left her to dispose of the evidence of his crime by disposing of herself altogether. Meanwhile, his wife, who had found out about it, did not leave, or punish him. Nor did she adopt the poor little girl. If anything, she began to get angry and worried as, now adults, her son fell in love with she who was technically his half-sister (eww!).
As I looked at my mum reading to me, all this came back to me. My mind whirred with the cascading visions of tiny, rectangular 'mugshots' of old, bearded, turbanned, male faces. I looked upon the writer of this 'humorous' article. His fat, round face was just about visible in black-and-white. I wanted to spit on it. More than anything, the urge to slap my mother fizzed dangerously in my arms. 'What the hell do you think you're doing?' I wanted to cry. 'How dare you try and sacrifice me to these people who have never had a period, never worried about leaving their family, never feared their wedding night with awful dread? OF COURSE marriages are full of women now; we all know the awful suffering that many Indian marriages entail and women turn up in sympathy and commiseration! They too remember how it felt to pin your scant hopes to this one day of grandeur, wishing for its flashy charm to rub itself off on the union forever sealed afterwards!'
However, it wasn't really that strong - gone are the days when I came anywhere near doing that. This was the merest flicker, and it gave way, as always to sadness. My mother is a compromised woman, lost in the values of the time she grew up in. She still moves within the fug of '50s India, and all I can do is cast it off. It is not me, it is not my culture, and I feel elated that at last I can express myself with a concrete example. So you say that these white club-going 'goris' aren't me? Well, those old, sanctimonious bearded twats aren't either! Nor is that overweight, high-blood-pressure-suffering housewife, who dares not even suggest things to her husband any longer for fear of provoking dispute! I'm not the virtuous bahu! I'm not a gold-digger! I don't want my children, my sisters or any of my immediate female relatives to suffer, and that is why I keep trying to take them all under my wing! I may not know my American cousin too well yet, or the daughter of my mum's 'brother' (I think he's actually her cousin?!) whom everyone discusses in low, disapproving tones for having married an older, white man. I may be estranged from my eldest female cousin, Rani - but I'll fight for them, I'll fight for them all in any way I can, just like I did for my eldest sister pre-wedding, when her husband started shouting at her over her wanting speeches. I got in trouble, but I was proud - because that, that is who I am, and for a brief, shining minute, I was no longer leading a double life. That is who I am, my 'identity', my 'culture'; that is me.
Friday, January 30, 2009
Monday, January 19, 2009
If You're Not The Libertarian... Turn Away Now!
This is a sort of odd open letter to The Libertarian. I'm not too sure why. Maybe it was the fact that he spent at least 3 hours today trying to help me do my work.
Hello you. I quite like the thought of you coming across this and your eyes widening with surprise. Knowing you, you'll probably start laughing and then be overcome with appreciation. I can hear you now, sighing delightedly. I know it's not as good as a REAL letter - there's no illustrations! - but I'll do you another one of those at some point. Promise.
Out of respect to you, I have kept any major details about you off my blog, and will continue to do so. I'd just like to stop briefly, wipe the sweat of exertion from my brow and bemoan the fact that, well, it's hard, y'know. My cold, logical mind is obsessively delighted by the fact that it's such a goddarn healthy relationship - I mean, you call when you say you will, I am able to have my perpetual foot-in-mouth syndrome - and somehow, as you would say, we 'muddle through.'
As for my sentimental side? Hooo boy. This is a lot more interesting/convoluted. It tends to be a toss-up of fear and abject astonishment. I'm just a girl, and you're just a boy, but here we are making the sort of love that you read about in books. Not long after we became a couple proper, the awful consciousness that you were someone I absolutely had to hold on to began to burn a hole in my guts. I felt crazy, because although you were tremendously important to me, you were by no means the centre of the universe. I had objectives beyond you and I still do, reduced though I am to the level of such sycophantic acts as this - writing a 'public' love letter (Good Lord, what next? Am I going to turn emo and etch out 'heartfelt' expressions of sentiment in 'guyliner'?).
I don't want to spend every waking moment with you, nor do you with I. I might not even spend every night with you. Don't expect me to become 'conventional' at any point (I don't have the social awareness to perform such a feat :-D), even if I have your sprogs. Which I really rather would like to do, as you know (Bloody Hell, KJB! What's happened to you? You've gone 'straight' etc. etc... ;-D).
As I struggle through trying to look after my sister and not fail my final year of university, the help you give me is so very appreciated. Words can scarcely convey my gratitude as you prevent me (repeatedly) from unravelling like a double-snipped ball of yarn. So, I guess I'm making this officially official. Though I suppose I had already. Take my freedom, take my time - take my life, in short. If I had more money, I would give it to you, though you haven't asked and never would. Hence I will give you the things that really matter to me, because...
I love you. Those three poor little words, how they strain under the weight of near-inexpressible meaning! I have always wanted to love, but you have shown yourself to be worthy of love. I am damaged, it's true, but I will offer you all that my poor, bruised little cardiac clock can muster. Don't be fooled - like a luxury car, it's much roomier inside :-D. Would that your face were receptive, like Braille, to the secrets of my entreating fingers, but it seems that by and large, your eyes comprehend what mine transmit (Green eyes! Ringed with hazel! Fnnnnn *melts*).
I tried to fight it. Sometimes I still do. However, there's no denying it - this love is the stuff from which fictions are spun. It is like inspiration, heady and refreshing. It has its moments, but as Forster said, there is something 'stable and quiet' at the bottom. Head and body independent, but you are possessed of that other one that also happens to matter.
So... yay for us. Thank you again. For existing and also for being wonderful. I know there'll be no comments, but as I said... in a year and a bit's time, you may have to watch your back, matey ;-D. Just to reiterate... I love you. You rock my world *projectile vomiting*
Any fule who happened to read this in fascinated horror is now free to go, and my sincerest apologies. Love... you know how it is (or do you? *raises eyebrow*).
Hello you. I quite like the thought of you coming across this and your eyes widening with surprise. Knowing you, you'll probably start laughing and then be overcome with appreciation. I can hear you now, sighing delightedly. I know it's not as good as a REAL letter - there's no illustrations! - but I'll do you another one of those at some point. Promise.
Out of respect to you, I have kept any major details about you off my blog, and will continue to do so. I'd just like to stop briefly, wipe the sweat of exertion from my brow and bemoan the fact that, well, it's hard, y'know. My cold, logical mind is obsessively delighted by the fact that it's such a goddarn healthy relationship - I mean, you call when you say you will, I am able to have my perpetual foot-in-mouth syndrome - and somehow, as you would say, we 'muddle through.'
As for my sentimental side? Hooo boy. This is a lot more interesting/convoluted. It tends to be a toss-up of fear and abject astonishment. I'm just a girl, and you're just a boy, but here we are making the sort of love that you read about in books. Not long after we became a couple proper, the awful consciousness that you were someone I absolutely had to hold on to began to burn a hole in my guts. I felt crazy, because although you were tremendously important to me, you were by no means the centre of the universe. I had objectives beyond you and I still do, reduced though I am to the level of such sycophantic acts as this - writing a 'public' love letter (Good Lord, what next? Am I going to turn emo and etch out 'heartfelt' expressions of sentiment in 'guyliner'?).
I don't want to spend every waking moment with you, nor do you with I. I might not even spend every night with you. Don't expect me to become 'conventional' at any point (I don't have the social awareness to perform such a feat :-D), even if I have your sprogs. Which I really rather would like to do, as you know (Bloody Hell, KJB! What's happened to you? You've gone 'straight' etc. etc... ;-D).
As I struggle through trying to look after my sister and not fail my final year of university, the help you give me is so very appreciated. Words can scarcely convey my gratitude as you prevent me (repeatedly) from unravelling like a double-snipped ball of yarn. So, I guess I'm making this officially official. Though I suppose I had already. Take my freedom, take my time - take my life, in short. If I had more money, I would give it to you, though you haven't asked and never would. Hence I will give you the things that really matter to me, because...
I love you. Those three poor little words, how they strain under the weight of near-inexpressible meaning! I have always wanted to love, but you have shown yourself to be worthy of love. I am damaged, it's true, but I will offer you all that my poor, bruised little cardiac clock can muster. Don't be fooled - like a luxury car, it's much roomier inside :-D. Would that your face were receptive, like Braille, to the secrets of my entreating fingers, but it seems that by and large, your eyes comprehend what mine transmit (Green eyes! Ringed with hazel! Fnnnnn *melts*).
I tried to fight it. Sometimes I still do. However, there's no denying it - this love is the stuff from which fictions are spun. It is like inspiration, heady and refreshing. It has its moments, but as Forster said, there is something 'stable and quiet' at the bottom. Head and body independent, but you are possessed of that other one that also happens to matter.
So... yay for us. Thank you again. For existing and also for being wonderful. I know there'll be no comments, but as I said... in a year and a bit's time, you may have to watch your back, matey ;-D. Just to reiterate... I love you. You rock my world *projectile vomiting*
Any fule who happened to read this in fascinated horror is now free to go, and my sincerest apologies. Love... you know how it is (or do you? *raises eyebrow*).
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Giving Up, Giving In
Oh dear sweet blog, what an utter, utter relief it is to be tappin' away on you again! I have had a seriously bad week (things really kicked up on Sunday morning, but I will only talk about that once I have the strength/anyone asks).
I read this article which got my mental cogs whirring rustily. Maybe I'll even write on it like I used to, who knows??! Lack of sleep, serious emotional stress and general need-to-cry have left me clogged and murky upstairs. What I really need is some sort of anonymous guardian angel figure who will kidnap me, appease the various people who arebaying for my blood asking me to do the bare minimum expected of me when I signed on to take a chunk of Governmental money to be educated. I get told that I am a good person, who makes people happy (chiefly by The Libertarian, bless him) but I do feel like a tremendous failure when things pile up on me. The knotted narrative of my life so far, in which all the events connect and nothing can be left out to fully understand the enormity of current problems, makes it that much harder.
After handing in an essay two days late by accident, after having spent all day writing another which WAS due today, I almost fell to pieces. Never had my skin felt thinner in recent memory, as I stood in front of the office of the somewhat perplexed Administrative Director of the School of English and Drama! I could feel heat creeping upon me; I knew how it might look to them, and I was ashamed. 'I'm not your common or garden layabout!' I wanted to shout with some sort of perverse pride. 'No; I'm in this situation because I'm pathetic enough to be deeply affected by the suffering of others! GO ON! PUNISH ME!'
Defeatist, much? I managed to recover 'Fight Mode' once they, very kindly, gave it an on-time stamp after all, but I was afraid. I knew that my memory, taxed with misery and fatigue, would probably fail me. Sure enough, it did - the essay was of course due in two days ago. Everyone else isn't always wrong, my mother used to say to me. It's YOU. I went to see my course organiser, quivering on the brink. She was very considerate and my skin thinned further, dangerously. She had misunderstood things slightly. I clarified. She went to recover my essay, and my skin collapsed altogether. Sat right there in her office, I cried. Oh, how much I wanted to cry my eyes out! How I wanted to slide to the floor, pull my coat over my face and cry pathetically in great, big, bursting sobs! Embarrassingly enough, my eyes are filling with tears in my university library as I type this.
Instead, I hyperventilated my way back to some semblance of composure. I could not embroil this poor woman - who had once asked me if I was alright after the seminar, because I hadn't contributed - in my personal failure to handle emotion. So, head dipped and shoulders shaking, I 'sucked it up'. A vague numbness settled over me and when she returned, I could occasionally flick glances towards her. There was an awful, genuine kindness in her eyes when she (repeatedly) apologised. She could probably tell from my shrivelled eyes that I had problems. Hence my inability to meet her eye. She advised me to speak to my advisor and submit an Extenuating Circumstances form. I comically imagined entering his office to meet with him and descending into a disastrous, weeping wreck.
A fear and pride held me back, just like it does. I want to resolve my feelings somehow. The urge to live, to be something is strong in me - but so too is the urge for destruction. Why? Why do I want to lie across a stranger's table and cry out my whole life? Why do I want to invite them to stamp over my feelings? Deep down, I know they probably won't. They'll just be appalled. They will probably, as many already have, give me credit for coping with the amount of familal bullying that I took.
I am a hypocrite though. I usually like grey areas, I like things to be complicated. Yet when it comes to the whole 'I need to get away from my family, but they have made more vocal expressions of love towards me recently than ever before and I feel horribly guilty. Plus, I'm the only real adult in the house emotionally' - I wish I could pass. I really do.
The source of much of this angst is that, when I returned innocently home last weekend to work on the essay I handed in today, I was served up the information that my elder sister (who was there, as I complained in my last post) is there for good because she has left her husband. He has always been abusive (not physically, thankfully for him). Much to my amazement, it was my parents who had told her to come back. A giant psychological shift has taken place - both my parents and my sister are being forced to reassess the way they see the world. My sister, at the age of 31, is being forced to consider life without a partner and children. I know that sounds dramatic; but that's how it is in her head. Remember that as a card-carrying member of the community we live in (unlike me), she subscribed fully to all the bullshit dictated to us by my parents, and especially my mother.
My mother, in a manner which really shouldn't surprise me, obviously feels both relief and guilt in great measure. I don't think she's quite emotionally developed enough to realise that, but as somebody who has borne the brunt of her tactlessness my whole life, I can see it. She keeps talking about how glad she is my sister is back, bringing up family skeletons and saying in an accusatory way 'I don't know how you stayed with him!'
GREAT, Mother. Just great. She's already feeling guilty of betraying him, as the abusee often feels upon escaping their abuser, and trying to make sense of why he married her in the first place when he obviously didn't love her. Make it worse, why don't you? Truly, we can do no right. We actually pointed this out to my mum ('If she had come back sooner, you would have accused her of not working at it') but my mum seemed rather oblivious. I don't hate my mum like I came close to in the past - I despair of her. She had the sheer presence of mind to bring up my sister's ex-fiance the other day (who broke off the engagement unexpectedly and without contact, and then tried to hide from her afterwards, fucking asshole) and say of her soon-to-be ex: 'It must have been something you did that really irritated him.'
Fucking hell! Though I know it really doesn't sound like it, she meant well in her completely cack-handed way. As my sister sobbed into her fleece, I turned and refashioned my mum's bald statement into what it was probably intended to be. 'You see? You see?' my mum leapt in eagerly, as she often does when I comment on the sorry affair. She flags up the evident sense in what I'm saying, I think with some relief, because Mater REALLY doesn't know how to do emotion.
So yes - at a time when I was already under hideous levels of pressure (two essays, Master's applications, a French presentation which should have been done LAST YEAR, behind on general French work and barely keeping up with my reading), this landed slap on me like a big, fat, fucking turd. This kind of shit makes me angry enough as it is, but the fact of it happening to my sister, my mum bringing up similar family history and meeting an old friend who had put her daughter's in-laws behind bars after a long fight increased my sense of despondent rage. At the very least, I wanted to be at home to look after my sister for the short period of time she has off, but nuuuuuu, I have to keep going and do fucking shit. Well, I am only human. I fail. I failed today. By a miracle (i.e. making it probably quite obvious that I would not refrain, if pushed, from crying in the English office), I was saved - but this is bullshit, yo.
I shouldn't have to be in this position. Maybe I sound like an ingrate for saying that, but that's how I feel, I'm afraid. I have no bitterness about all the time I lost looking after my sister (why the fuck should I?) but it just seems so very fucking unfair that this kind of bollocks happens to me. Furthermore, when I grovel before my advisor and the evaluatory board that may or may not condemn me for my failure of memory, I must reduce this all to one paragraph. How shittily pathetic is it going to sound, do you think? 'Sorry, I think I'm developing a stomach ulcer because my sister's getting divorced.' I know it's not right - but good God, part of me almost feels like I deserve it. Maybe I do. Maybe I should have been professional to the end, as my mother no doubt would have been.
Ah well, fucking bullshit essays handed in, still not had a shower and the French presentation looms over me like an executioner. Time I went back to the flat, had dinner andleapt out of the window forced myself to read until I fall asleep with exhaustion and then stay up later than necessary for no good reason because I can't relax and the fridge is too loud.
Well, I'm a regular bundle of joy - but so run the joys of blogging. It's like offloading on people without actually doing so. No need to make small talk, no need to force myself to be suitably smiley. I am free of social convention's oppression and I can wallow in my mounting unhappiness. Not a joke, not a hint of a smile. Sometimes even krazy jelly beans lose all their colour.
I read this article which got my mental cogs whirring rustily. Maybe I'll even write on it like I used to, who knows??! Lack of sleep, serious emotional stress and general need-to-cry have left me clogged and murky upstairs. What I really need is some sort of anonymous guardian angel figure who will kidnap me, appease the various people who are
After handing in an essay two days late by accident, after having spent all day writing another which WAS due today, I almost fell to pieces. Never had my skin felt thinner in recent memory, as I stood in front of the office of the somewhat perplexed Administrative Director of the School of English and Drama! I could feel heat creeping upon me; I knew how it might look to them, and I was ashamed. 'I'm not your common or garden layabout!' I wanted to shout with some sort of perverse pride. 'No; I'm in this situation because I'm pathetic enough to be deeply affected by the suffering of others! GO ON! PUNISH ME!'
Defeatist, much? I managed to recover 'Fight Mode' once they, very kindly, gave it an on-time stamp after all, but I was afraid. I knew that my memory, taxed with misery and fatigue, would probably fail me. Sure enough, it did - the essay was of course due in two days ago. Everyone else isn't always wrong, my mother used to say to me. It's YOU. I went to see my course organiser, quivering on the brink. She was very considerate and my skin thinned further, dangerously. She had misunderstood things slightly. I clarified. She went to recover my essay, and my skin collapsed altogether. Sat right there in her office, I cried. Oh, how much I wanted to cry my eyes out! How I wanted to slide to the floor, pull my coat over my face and cry pathetically in great, big, bursting sobs! Embarrassingly enough, my eyes are filling with tears in my university library as I type this.
Instead, I hyperventilated my way back to some semblance of composure. I could not embroil this poor woman - who had once asked me if I was alright after the seminar, because I hadn't contributed - in my personal failure to handle emotion. So, head dipped and shoulders shaking, I 'sucked it up'. A vague numbness settled over me and when she returned, I could occasionally flick glances towards her. There was an awful, genuine kindness in her eyes when she (repeatedly) apologised. She could probably tell from my shrivelled eyes that I had problems. Hence my inability to meet her eye. She advised me to speak to my advisor and submit an Extenuating Circumstances form. I comically imagined entering his office to meet with him and descending into a disastrous, weeping wreck.
A fear and pride held me back, just like it does. I want to resolve my feelings somehow. The urge to live, to be something is strong in me - but so too is the urge for destruction. Why? Why do I want to lie across a stranger's table and cry out my whole life? Why do I want to invite them to stamp over my feelings? Deep down, I know they probably won't. They'll just be appalled. They will probably, as many already have, give me credit for coping with the amount of familal bullying that I took.
I am a hypocrite though. I usually like grey areas, I like things to be complicated. Yet when it comes to the whole 'I need to get away from my family, but they have made more vocal expressions of love towards me recently than ever before and I feel horribly guilty. Plus, I'm the only real adult in the house emotionally' - I wish I could pass. I really do.
The source of much of this angst is that, when I returned innocently home last weekend to work on the essay I handed in today, I was served up the information that my elder sister (who was there, as I complained in my last post) is there for good because she has left her husband. He has always been abusive (not physically, thankfully for him). Much to my amazement, it was my parents who had told her to come back. A giant psychological shift has taken place - both my parents and my sister are being forced to reassess the way they see the world. My sister, at the age of 31, is being forced to consider life without a partner and children. I know that sounds dramatic; but that's how it is in her head. Remember that as a card-carrying member of the community we live in (unlike me), she subscribed fully to all the bullshit dictated to us by my parents, and especially my mother.
My mother, in a manner which really shouldn't surprise me, obviously feels both relief and guilt in great measure. I don't think she's quite emotionally developed enough to realise that, but as somebody who has borne the brunt of her tactlessness my whole life, I can see it. She keeps talking about how glad she is my sister is back, bringing up family skeletons and saying in an accusatory way 'I don't know how you stayed with him!'
GREAT, Mother. Just great. She's already feeling guilty of betraying him, as the abusee often feels upon escaping their abuser, and trying to make sense of why he married her in the first place when he obviously didn't love her. Make it worse, why don't you? Truly, we can do no right. We actually pointed this out to my mum ('If she had come back sooner, you would have accused her of not working at it') but my mum seemed rather oblivious. I don't hate my mum like I came close to in the past - I despair of her. She had the sheer presence of mind to bring up my sister's ex-fiance the other day (who broke off the engagement unexpectedly and without contact, and then tried to hide from her afterwards, fucking asshole) and say of her soon-to-be ex: 'It must have been something you did that really irritated him.'
Fucking hell! Though I know it really doesn't sound like it, she meant well in her completely cack-handed way. As my sister sobbed into her fleece, I turned and refashioned my mum's bald statement into what it was probably intended to be. 'You see? You see?' my mum leapt in eagerly, as she often does when I comment on the sorry affair. She flags up the evident sense in what I'm saying, I think with some relief, because Mater REALLY doesn't know how to do emotion.
So yes - at a time when I was already under hideous levels of pressure (two essays, Master's applications, a French presentation which should have been done LAST YEAR, behind on general French work and barely keeping up with my reading), this landed slap on me like a big, fat, fucking turd. This kind of shit makes me angry enough as it is, but the fact of it happening to my sister, my mum bringing up similar family history and meeting an old friend who had put her daughter's in-laws behind bars after a long fight increased my sense of despondent rage. At the very least, I wanted to be at home to look after my sister for the short period of time she has off, but nuuuuuu, I have to keep going and do fucking shit. Well, I am only human. I fail. I failed today. By a miracle (i.e. making it probably quite obvious that I would not refrain, if pushed, from crying in the English office), I was saved - but this is bullshit, yo.
I shouldn't have to be in this position. Maybe I sound like an ingrate for saying that, but that's how I feel, I'm afraid. I have no bitterness about all the time I lost looking after my sister (why the fuck should I?) but it just seems so very fucking unfair that this kind of bollocks happens to me. Furthermore, when I grovel before my advisor and the evaluatory board that may or may not condemn me for my failure of memory, I must reduce this all to one paragraph. How shittily pathetic is it going to sound, do you think? 'Sorry, I think I'm developing a stomach ulcer because my sister's getting divorced.' I know it's not right - but good God, part of me almost feels like I deserve it. Maybe I do. Maybe I should have been professional to the end, as my mother no doubt would have been.
Ah well, fucking bullshit essays handed in, still not had a shower and the French presentation looms over me like an executioner. Time I went back to the flat, had dinner and
Well, I'm a regular bundle of joy - but so run the joys of blogging. It's like offloading on people without actually doing so. No need to make small talk, no need to force myself to be suitably smiley. I am free of social convention's oppression and I can wallow in my mounting unhappiness. Not a joke, not a hint of a smile. Sometimes even krazy jelly beans lose all their colour.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Time Of The Month
Me needs a rant. I have come back home, been received back into the warm, Internet-fuelled glow of home... and what do I find? Only that my sister is fucking sleeping in my bed. Why can't we just have ONE beautiful, unforgettable night together, the double-bed and I? The Libertarian was visiting me as usual yesterday, and I sleep marvellously in his arms (and generally better when he is present), but otherwise, my thoughts scrabble about like overexcitable rats in a maze to the potentially chart-busting sounds of my fridge whirring and making sudden loud popping noises, unexpected semi-explosive clanks of the radiator and idiots being themselves in all their glory outside my window. Let's not forget the joys of living in a student house - one person uses the water in any way whatsoever, and the plumbing broadcasts it to you like a delightfully primitive version of Twitter: 'L--- is washing her hands', 'J----- has just taken a piss,' 'L--- is preparing the veg for her usual 12 a.m. supper. Please insert fork violently and repeatedly into delicate brain matter as required'.
Music shall not be made (the music of I, yes, that is ME, SLEEPING FOR ONCE and also occasionally breaking wind) between the sheets, because MY FUCKING SISTER IS THERE.
One of my best friends, quizzically: 'Isn't your sister married?!'
Well, exactly. So here is a poem from 2004 to keep me going. Thank you to all ye who commented on the passing (now official) of my laptop. I ONLY BOUGHT THE FUCKER IN 2007, IT HAS EMERGED! FUCK YOU, Fujitsu Siemens. Fuck you *shakes head*. I just keep hearing 'Buy a Mac, they never get viruses.'
Yes, and live on water and whatever has fallen onto the carpet until I graduate. Instead, here I am, back at home just so I can apply for a Master's and write an essay. :-(
Time Of The Month
I hate it here. Everyone’s cheese to my grater
I want to shred them and rip them up like
Balls of scrunched scrap paper. Get AWAY from me!
I’m offering no leniency. If you plan to get
What you want, then leave, annoying me, like
Spilled water drops on an oil-coated surface,
Dream on. The burn marks will stay with me
Scars of trying to keep my anger on a steady simmer
When it longs to boil over; the lid rattles
The pot that is my face strains; copper glows
Becoming brick-red. How much more should I take?
Don’t piss me off. The temptation to pluck you
Between finger and thumb, then toss you away
Like so many unwashed clothes comes. But you’re
A waste of space; hell with it, I’d rather flick you
Or kick you. You sit smugly in my place with
A look of challenge. Do you want me to rip
It off, and use it to clean my shoe? I’ll wring
Tears aplenty from you, like blood between my thighs.
Put you through a mangle; I’ll bend you to my will
Like Yuri and his spoon, only smoother, pernicious.
Tell me; how do you like your humiliation?
Ritual, indelible, or just well done? You answer
The question, I question your answer, since like
A used-car salesman, I’m master of my craft.
I deliver. Retribution. I know how to pull a spin,
Constant is my aim to kill. Manipulative and
Mendacious incubus. I am as a little fire-cracker,
Tailed as a tadpole, smashing brightly on the pavement.
I’ll dabble in wordplay, teasing out my tongue
Supple and thin; all the better to lash you with.
My gut seems to contract and squeeze, burping
Out more crunching aches. This discordant rhythm
Is echoed in the auto-ignition of my fury at
The slightest frisson of friction. Frustrated and
Irritated, because I always feel unclean!
Take care that you never dare cross a girl
Of sixteen when she’s menstruating.
P.S.: The best agony uncle ever is back! Bow down, bow down! REEEEESPECT!
And FOR ALL YE COMIC FANS (the Watchmen movie is out this year! Hyperventilate, hyperventilate).
Music shall not be made (the music of I, yes, that is ME, SLEEPING FOR ONCE and also occasionally breaking wind) between the sheets, because MY FUCKING SISTER IS THERE.
One of my best friends, quizzically: 'Isn't your sister married?!'
Well, exactly. So here is a poem from 2004 to keep me going. Thank you to all ye who commented on the passing (now official) of my laptop. I ONLY BOUGHT THE FUCKER IN 2007, IT HAS EMERGED! FUCK YOU, Fujitsu Siemens. Fuck you *shakes head*. I just keep hearing 'Buy a Mac, they never get viruses.'
Yes, and live on water and whatever has fallen onto the carpet until I graduate. Instead, here I am, back at home just so I can apply for a Master's and write an essay. :-(
Time Of The Month
I hate it here. Everyone’s cheese to my grater
I want to shred them and rip them up like
Balls of scrunched scrap paper. Get AWAY from me!
I’m offering no leniency. If you plan to get
What you want, then leave, annoying me, like
Spilled water drops on an oil-coated surface,
Dream on. The burn marks will stay with me
Scars of trying to keep my anger on a steady simmer
When it longs to boil over; the lid rattles
The pot that is my face strains; copper glows
Becoming brick-red. How much more should I take?
Don’t piss me off. The temptation to pluck you
Between finger and thumb, then toss you away
Like so many unwashed clothes comes. But you’re
A waste of space; hell with it, I’d rather flick you
Or kick you. You sit smugly in my place with
A look of challenge. Do you want me to rip
It off, and use it to clean my shoe? I’ll wring
Tears aplenty from you, like blood between my thighs.
Put you through a mangle; I’ll bend you to my will
Like Yuri and his spoon, only smoother, pernicious.
Tell me; how do you like your humiliation?
Ritual, indelible, or just well done? You answer
The question, I question your answer, since like
A used-car salesman, I’m master of my craft.
I deliver. Retribution. I know how to pull a spin,
Constant is my aim to kill. Manipulative and
Mendacious incubus. I am as a little fire-cracker,
Tailed as a tadpole, smashing brightly on the pavement.
I’ll dabble in wordplay, teasing out my tongue
Supple and thin; all the better to lash you with.
My gut seems to contract and squeeze, burping
Out more crunching aches. This discordant rhythm
Is echoed in the auto-ignition of my fury at
The slightest frisson of friction. Frustrated and
Irritated, because I always feel unclean!
Take care that you never dare cross a girl
Of sixteen when she’s menstruating.
P.S.: The best agony uncle ever is back! Bow down, bow down! REEEEESPECT!
And FOR ALL YE COMIC FANS (the Watchmen movie is out this year! Hyperventilate, hyperventilate).
Thursday, January 01, 2009
Technological Apocalypse
My laptop - at an extremely stressful time for me - has decided to give up the good fight. Yesterday, the screen went suddenly black when I moved it. I have noticed that when moved, this tends to happen. It appears to still be working, because the little lights are flashing, the screen just dies. Unfortunately, I think the number of consecutive reboots I've performed in trying to get the screen to work (my dad managed it yesterday!) have brought down the wrath of some techno-God, because when I turned it on for the last fateful time yesterday, it informed me sternly that there had been a driver failure (something about IQL?!) and told me to perform advanced Startup Repair. It then froze in the midst of these repairs, leading to much distress from me.
'Well, when I was at university, I didn't have a laptop,' consoled The Libertarian upon calling me later and hearing my cheerily-expressed desire to murder the bloody thing by dashing it to pieces, preferably 'pon my knee for maximum satisfaction (HA! TAKE THAT, TECHNOLOGY! FEEL MY BRUTE HUMAN STRENGTH!).
'I had a quill... and parchment...' Cue near-helpless snickering.
'Did you also hand in your essays by carrier pigeon?' I asked.
'Oh - but of course.'
So, you see, I am not weeping, wailing or thrashing like a Kathy who has lost her Heathcliff just yet. I am going to, ahem, vigorously 'patronise' the uni PCs because it's not really looking at all likely that I can take my PC back with me (even if the Advanced Startup Repairs it was performing this morning were successful, whatever the hell it is that's loose or in need of replacing somewhere on the left side of its innards - yeah, I've got the measure of you, Amilo Li 1705! - needs to be dealt with).
However, considering that this probably means I will go insane (I won't be able to play my music except on my IPod, access the Internet in my room, watch TV or read comics), I am a little apprehensive. I'll have to make entertainment the old-fashioned way, which probably means I'll get ahead with my reading for once.
The only terrible fear I have is that my PC will end up being foutu beyond saving. Please God, no. I have copies of my work and of pretty much all the music on it, bar Girls Aloud's back catalogue and of the TV shows... but all my pictures ever are there! It'll be goodbye to those, and also to all my first two years' uni work, which is a really scary thought.
So... I guess... Happy 2009 to you all! I hope you had a wonderful celebration and that this year will be satisfying for you, and I really mean that. Thank you so much for reading me, it's appreciated.
(Pray for meeeeeeeeeee!)
'Well, when I was at university, I didn't have a laptop,' consoled The Libertarian upon calling me later and hearing my cheerily-expressed desire to murder the bloody thing by dashing it to pieces, preferably 'pon my knee for maximum satisfaction (HA! TAKE THAT, TECHNOLOGY! FEEL MY BRUTE HUMAN STRENGTH!).
'I had a quill... and parchment...' Cue near-helpless snickering.
'Did you also hand in your essays by carrier pigeon?' I asked.
'Oh - but of course.'
So, you see, I am not weeping, wailing or thrashing like a Kathy who has lost her Heathcliff just yet. I am going to, ahem, vigorously 'patronise' the uni PCs because it's not really looking at all likely that I can take my PC back with me (even if the Advanced Startup Repairs it was performing this morning were successful, whatever the hell it is that's loose or in need of replacing somewhere on the left side of its innards - yeah, I've got the measure of you, Amilo Li 1705! - needs to be dealt with).
However, considering that this probably means I will go insane (I won't be able to play my music except on my IPod, access the Internet in my room, watch TV or read comics), I am a little apprehensive. I'll have to make entertainment the old-fashioned way, which probably means I'll get ahead with my reading for once.
The only terrible fear I have is that my PC will end up being foutu beyond saving. Please God, no. I have copies of my work and of pretty much all the music on it, bar Girls Aloud's back catalogue and of the TV shows... but all my pictures ever are there! It'll be goodbye to those, and also to all my first two years' uni work, which is a really scary thought.
So... I guess... Happy 2009 to you all! I hope you had a wonderful celebration and that this year will be satisfying for you, and I really mean that. Thank you so much for reading me, it's appreciated.
(Pray for meeeeeeeeeee!)
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Disastrous Combination...
Being in love and having writer's block. Good God, why don't you just club me over the head and/or chloroform me up, right now?
I feel like the Modernist agenda made flesh. I AM the failure of language. My ideas drift, well-fed and complacent in my head, like a blundering lot of sheep. No sheepdog of logical structural framework will surface in order to corral them into sense, into expression.
As if to ram home the insult - to thoroughly augment my distress - a multitude of memories keeps throwing itself against the straining walls of my mind. It wants out. It will not abate until I find myself, sprawled in my blanket, eyes unfocussed and mind in flight towards HIM again.
I thought that healthy love would make me feel like one of those battery-powered flashing pens; frivolous but paradoxically justified by the very fact of my frivolity. In a world of ruthless linearity would come a dancing rupture. In the cynical Eden of progression - studyworkhouseholdtaskscareerADULTHOOD! - would arrive a snake offering me the most ironically important knowledge of all. The knowledge of an event beyond my control, beyond my understanding and most thoroughly beyond my rationalisation.
Yet in my feeblest moments - I find myself naked! Robbed of my critical capacities, endowed with an art that leads me back, always to HIM. Him, him, HIM! I find myself divided into an unholy Trinity: the Admonisher, the Sufferer and the Artist. The Artist seeks to further the capital of distraction, banking as she does on the antagonism of Admonisher and Sufferer. I see the Admonisher stood over the Sufferer, curled at her feet. Here we have the classic mother-daughter dynamic in play. The elder warns the younger that great things are stake. The younger, attempting to direct her trembling lips through reluctant weeping, concedes - accepts the remark - but her heart is rebellious. It whispers its fears that the elder is perhaps not as experienced as she might like to say, that perhaps there is a certain wisdom in the foolhardy courage of inexperience that well-travelled cynicism lacks.
Schizophrenic is the experience! Surrounded on all sides by the doors of obfuscation, I knock like a game-show contestant: tentative, beating regular like a tiny, desperate heart. My own desperate intelligence is paralysed by a Freudian crisis, meeting such phrases as 'self-reflexive text', 'settled cultural authority,' 'fissiparous': to kiss or to kill? All the while, the hounds of love pursue me, waiting their chance to drag me into somnolence, overcome as Cerberus by Orpheus.
During the the day, he held me to his chest; during the nights, he pursued me like a gender-bent Actaeon - should not I be Artemis? - claiming me again, again and again. 'Enough!' I tried to scream. 'I love you!' The words refused to come in my state of animal panic. If I could, I would have supplicated him: 'O beloved, come as my handsome prince! Deliver me from the state of sleep and inexpression whence I suffer!'
Then, I recalled, Sleeping Beauty was no feminist. The spell broke, I fell back; into an affliction of the most Modernist inarticulation; my prince looming in the shadows with my fleeing last shreds of inspiration - and the tears welled in me for want of confidence.
I feel like the Modernist agenda made flesh. I AM the failure of language. My ideas drift, well-fed and complacent in my head, like a blundering lot of sheep. No sheepdog of logical structural framework will surface in order to corral them into sense, into expression.
As if to ram home the insult - to thoroughly augment my distress - a multitude of memories keeps throwing itself against the straining walls of my mind. It wants out. It will not abate until I find myself, sprawled in my blanket, eyes unfocussed and mind in flight towards HIM again.
I thought that healthy love would make me feel like one of those battery-powered flashing pens; frivolous but paradoxically justified by the very fact of my frivolity. In a world of ruthless linearity would come a dancing rupture. In the cynical Eden of progression - studyworkhouseholdtaskscareerADULTHOOD! - would arrive a snake offering me the most ironically important knowledge of all. The knowledge of an event beyond my control, beyond my understanding and most thoroughly beyond my rationalisation.
Yet in my feeblest moments - I find myself naked! Robbed of my critical capacities, endowed with an art that leads me back, always to HIM. Him, him, HIM! I find myself divided into an unholy Trinity: the Admonisher, the Sufferer and the Artist. The Artist seeks to further the capital of distraction, banking as she does on the antagonism of Admonisher and Sufferer. I see the Admonisher stood over the Sufferer, curled at her feet. Here we have the classic mother-daughter dynamic in play. The elder warns the younger that great things are stake. The younger, attempting to direct her trembling lips through reluctant weeping, concedes - accepts the remark - but her heart is rebellious. It whispers its fears that the elder is perhaps not as experienced as she might like to say, that perhaps there is a certain wisdom in the foolhardy courage of inexperience that well-travelled cynicism lacks.
Schizophrenic is the experience! Surrounded on all sides by the doors of obfuscation, I knock like a game-show contestant: tentative, beating regular like a tiny, desperate heart. My own desperate intelligence is paralysed by a Freudian crisis, meeting such phrases as 'self-reflexive text', 'settled cultural authority,' 'fissiparous': to kiss or to kill? All the while, the hounds of love pursue me, waiting their chance to drag me into somnolence, overcome as Cerberus by Orpheus.
During the the day, he held me to his chest; during the nights, he pursued me like a gender-bent Actaeon - should not I be Artemis? - claiming me again, again and again. 'Enough!' I tried to scream. 'I love you!' The words refused to come in my state of animal panic. If I could, I would have supplicated him: 'O beloved, come as my handsome prince! Deliver me from the state of sleep and inexpression whence I suffer!'
Then, I recalled, Sleeping Beauty was no feminist. The spell broke, I fell back; into an affliction of the most Modernist inarticulation; my prince looming in the shadows with my fleeing last shreds of inspiration - and the tears welled in me for want of confidence.
Monday, December 29, 2008
Tradition: The Skinny
In keeping with my entirely non-existent claim to be an expert on well, pretty much everything, I am going to publish another rant (hopefully briefer than my previous ones, I hear you pant. We just can't keep up with these marathon spewings! Why, my pretties, I do apologise. I've been staying up too late and eating badly, and these are the pungent results... :-D).
So, here's the deal, as the Genie says in Disney's Aladdin while dressed as a sort of weird blue teddy-boy. Tradition is something I militate against quite frequently. Not in the fashion of a D.H. Lawrence or a Marinetti. I do go off on one about the importance of art to life, but I'm not kidding myself. I am more in line with the likes of Forster and Proust, as already stated, in that I believe we can't just break off from the past.
However, we really mustn't enshrine it either. LESSON NUMBER ONE!
We have our individual pasts, and then there is also the 'collective' past, generally expressed (or seen to be) through popular culture. We tend to see our individual pasts as branching off from the 'collective' past, often through our experiences of popular culture. In short, everyone often feels a need to watch the 'It' programme, or listen to the 'It' band of the moment, even though they might not be aware of what this entails. (I always felt very left out for not being able to watch Trigger Happy TV, but now it doesn't seem to me that I really missed out...).
Humans are social beings, innit, and that's why the collective past is important to us. It gives our lives meaning in a small way, and it gives them meaning in a much easier way than the painfully grown-up notion of our responsibility to the world as inhabitants of it that we get slapped with later on.
I mean, think of how beautifully simple it is when you can discuss Eastenders with somebody. For that brief period of time, you exist fully and purely in your satisfying and simple interaction with another person. Nothing tangible has been created, but a connection has flared, flickered and thrown the whole, creaking framework of your drudging life into a sort of glorious perspective for a while. Equally, this is a moment of real freedom, because you are not being forced to produce, nor are you at the mercy of a biological drive which demands that you compare yourself to another being, or procreate with them. 'Survival of the fittest,' 'the rat race' and 'the daily grind' all fall away for a minute and do you know what the best thing is? It's a secular connection. This is not some out-of-yourself moment of transcendance; you are fully conscious of what occurs. Now, ain't that almost spiritual?
We need to stop behaving as if this disappears altogether when we grow up, because it doesn't. Life is undoubtedly harder in adulthood than it is in childhood, but at least now we can appreciate these little moments of connection. People forget how much time you spend being bored and whiny when you're a kid... because you take all that shit for granted. Everything is easy, we are taught to expect... and therein lies the key-phrase. Taught to expect. We are also taught to expect adulthood a certain way. Can we not just get a grip, please? Not everyone's past is that amazing. I loved the books I read, but I'm pretty happy to be who I am now.
These days, because people limply accept that they will have to work forever to afford all the things they want and the lifestyle they think they deserve, we seem to be losing sight more and more of that very infantile luxury: the luxury of taking stock. That poem about how we don't have time to just exist, sums it up for me. Why on Earth can people not just drop their standards a little? You don't HAVE to have a 36-inch TV. If need be, surely you could just use your laptop instead of buying a DVD player. And just how many sofas do you need, really?
I hate to sound all poncey and spiritual, but it's true - those things won't go with you when you die. Knowing that you finally managed to get that Mercedes-Benz is REALLY going to make that passage to the Other Side so much easier, isn't it? What the fuck is wrong with people?
This is where people go badly wrong. In the hopes of having something which will defy human mortality, they cling to tradition. The idea, if you think about it, being that traditions are passed down from generation to generation. In short, they are another manifestation of the human ego's frantic need to circumvent death.
Let me put it to you people straight: YOU WILL DIE AND STOP EXISTING. Unappealing as that sounds, that's just how it is. Get it through your heads. God may or may not exist, who fuckin' KNOWS if we have an afterlife, but we are born and we die. Clinging to tradition does NOT mean you escape.
A lot of diasporans have this real anxiety about mortality, you will notice, if you speak to them about their children becoming 'Westernised' and 'losing their culture.'
Permit me to be outrageous. Mummy, Daddy, I'm afraid that Indian culture is NOT MY CULTURE. I do enjoy elements of it, but I grew up in this country. I have internalised a different set of norms, I plan on living within the social mores which I am used to, and your grief, while understandable and upsetting, is entirely deluded. I personally believe that many 1st-generation Asians are actually projecting their own insecurities onto their children. Many of them are well aware of the fact that their 'homeland' has changed almost beyond belief and that even if they were to return, they wouldn't be able to hack it. To put it bluntly, the India they knew is long dead and they have not been able to grieve and move on because they are stuck in the denial stage.
That's why I consider patriotism - the full-blown emotional strain of it that borders on chauvinism and nationalism - to be really fucking dumb. Nations are composed of people, and people change. Pretty simple, I'd think. And yet, when it's only when talking to family friends, that my mum remarks how 'They have become modern and we are old-fashioned now.' Yes. Well done. Now write it down and learn it by heart.
To return to what I was saying: Indian culture is not 'mine' and it never was. That's tantamount to throwing a book at somebody and shouting 'Why haven't you read it? It's yours!' What utter cack. If you value the dissemination of tradition above all, if the mortality of your memories and the loss of your emotional world is something that you are not adult enough to handle, then please do everyone a favour and fuck off back to where you came from. I would say, in fatalistic fashion 'Raise your kids there if it bothers you that much!' but that would contravene my beliefs about parenthood being a process of nurturing rather than of ownership.
Traditions are a big lie, because, like everything else in the world spawned of humanity, they are subject to perversion and misinterpretation. Bitch please, they do not all carry on being the same after you die. I mean, is child-marriage as common in India as it used to be? Thank Gawd, no! I am stressing this because the lie of tradition is that you are 'investing' in something that you consider to be yours, and effectively trying to overcome death in the process.
I find it really funny that people give so much prominence to tradition when all it is, is habit. I could make a 'tradition' out of only bathing once a week if I wanted to... but I don't because it would be disgusting. That's why, similarly, 'traditions' based around, for example, the wearing of a certain religious symbol, or dressing in a particular manner, are often pretty stupid. Most people won't be aware of the original meaning, and many of them won't necessarily even agree, but the force of habit will hold them tight nonetheless.
Sometimes I wonder why we humans are so desperately keen to latch onto abstract notions when, much of the time, we can't be arsed to invest the time and effort to fully comprehend those abstract notions. Fucking idiots, so we are. Or are we geniuses? The whole point of making something that is so utterly abstract as to be verging on incomprehensible, is that people find it that much harder to question!
I'll finish by fielding a perhaps scandalous suggestion: maybe, oh 1st-gens, maybe your cultures are 'dying' (or so it seems to you) because you yourselves do not have sufficient awareness to teach the yoot about them properly. Or maybe they are dying because that is the natural order of things? Did I not speak earlier of 'survival of the fittest'? It can apply to the world of culture too, you know.
Personally, I believe that saying cultures are 'dying' is bullshit, especially if a lot of people are aware of their existence. A tiny mountain tribe which goes unchronicled and whose inhabitants all move away and convert to Christianity - perhaps that could be called a 'death,' but c'mon, how often does that really happen?
Another reason why I think clinging fervently to traditions is to be avoided at best is because it leads to things like the Partition of India, which involved horrific behaviour by people of all religions in the name of religion and tradition (oh, how cosily synonymous are the two on most occasions! *grimaces*). People can level all sorts of names and accusations at me, but I kind of agree with Nietzsche on this one: the world needs to indulge in a little more 'active forgetting' at times. (OBVIOUSLY some things, like the Holocaust, and indeed Partition, must never be forgotten, but they must also be remembered for the right reasons). We need to learn to let the tide of change come sweeping in, because it's always going to, whether we like it or not. Don't be making yourself look as foolish as ol' Canute did (although he did it intentionally...)!
So, here's the deal, as the Genie says in Disney's Aladdin while dressed as a sort of weird blue teddy-boy. Tradition is something I militate against quite frequently. Not in the fashion of a D.H. Lawrence or a Marinetti. I do go off on one about the importance of art to life, but I'm not kidding myself. I am more in line with the likes of Forster and Proust, as already stated, in that I believe we can't just break off from the past.
However, we really mustn't enshrine it either. LESSON NUMBER ONE!
We have our individual pasts, and then there is also the 'collective' past, generally expressed (or seen to be) through popular culture. We tend to see our individual pasts as branching off from the 'collective' past, often through our experiences of popular culture. In short, everyone often feels a need to watch the 'It' programme, or listen to the 'It' band of the moment, even though they might not be aware of what this entails. (I always felt very left out for not being able to watch Trigger Happy TV, but now it doesn't seem to me that I really missed out...).
Humans are social beings, innit, and that's why the collective past is important to us. It gives our lives meaning in a small way, and it gives them meaning in a much easier way than the painfully grown-up notion of our responsibility to the world as inhabitants of it that we get slapped with later on.
I mean, think of how beautifully simple it is when you can discuss Eastenders with somebody. For that brief period of time, you exist fully and purely in your satisfying and simple interaction with another person. Nothing tangible has been created, but a connection has flared, flickered and thrown the whole, creaking framework of your drudging life into a sort of glorious perspective for a while. Equally, this is a moment of real freedom, because you are not being forced to produce, nor are you at the mercy of a biological drive which demands that you compare yourself to another being, or procreate with them. 'Survival of the fittest,' 'the rat race' and 'the daily grind' all fall away for a minute and do you know what the best thing is? It's a secular connection. This is not some out-of-yourself moment of transcendance; you are fully conscious of what occurs. Now, ain't that almost spiritual?
We need to stop behaving as if this disappears altogether when we grow up, because it doesn't. Life is undoubtedly harder in adulthood than it is in childhood, but at least now we can appreciate these little moments of connection. People forget how much time you spend being bored and whiny when you're a kid... because you take all that shit for granted. Everything is easy, we are taught to expect... and therein lies the key-phrase. Taught to expect. We are also taught to expect adulthood a certain way. Can we not just get a grip, please? Not everyone's past is that amazing. I loved the books I read, but I'm pretty happy to be who I am now.
These days, because people limply accept that they will have to work forever to afford all the things they want and the lifestyle they think they deserve, we seem to be losing sight more and more of that very infantile luxury: the luxury of taking stock. That poem about how we don't have time to just exist, sums it up for me. Why on Earth can people not just drop their standards a little? You don't HAVE to have a 36-inch TV. If need be, surely you could just use your laptop instead of buying a DVD player. And just how many sofas do you need, really?
I hate to sound all poncey and spiritual, but it's true - those things won't go with you when you die. Knowing that you finally managed to get that Mercedes-Benz is REALLY going to make that passage to the Other Side so much easier, isn't it? What the fuck is wrong with people?
This is where people go badly wrong. In the hopes of having something which will defy human mortality, they cling to tradition. The idea, if you think about it, being that traditions are passed down from generation to generation. In short, they are another manifestation of the human ego's frantic need to circumvent death.
Let me put it to you people straight: YOU WILL DIE AND STOP EXISTING. Unappealing as that sounds, that's just how it is. Get it through your heads. God may or may not exist, who fuckin' KNOWS if we have an afterlife, but we are born and we die. Clinging to tradition does NOT mean you escape.
A lot of diasporans have this real anxiety about mortality, you will notice, if you speak to them about their children becoming 'Westernised' and 'losing their culture.'
Permit me to be outrageous. Mummy, Daddy, I'm afraid that Indian culture is NOT MY CULTURE. I do enjoy elements of it, but I grew up in this country. I have internalised a different set of norms, I plan on living within the social mores which I am used to, and your grief, while understandable and upsetting, is entirely deluded. I personally believe that many 1st-generation Asians are actually projecting their own insecurities onto their children. Many of them are well aware of the fact that their 'homeland' has changed almost beyond belief and that even if they were to return, they wouldn't be able to hack it. To put it bluntly, the India they knew is long dead and they have not been able to grieve and move on because they are stuck in the denial stage.
That's why I consider patriotism - the full-blown emotional strain of it that borders on chauvinism and nationalism - to be really fucking dumb. Nations are composed of people, and people change. Pretty simple, I'd think. And yet, when it's only when talking to family friends, that my mum remarks how 'They have become modern and we are old-fashioned now.' Yes. Well done. Now write it down and learn it by heart.
To return to what I was saying: Indian culture is not 'mine' and it never was. That's tantamount to throwing a book at somebody and shouting 'Why haven't you read it? It's yours!' What utter cack. If you value the dissemination of tradition above all, if the mortality of your memories and the loss of your emotional world is something that you are not adult enough to handle, then please do everyone a favour and fuck off back to where you came from. I would say, in fatalistic fashion 'Raise your kids there if it bothers you that much!' but that would contravene my beliefs about parenthood being a process of nurturing rather than of ownership.
Traditions are a big lie, because, like everything else in the world spawned of humanity, they are subject to perversion and misinterpretation. Bitch please, they do not all carry on being the same after you die. I mean, is child-marriage as common in India as it used to be? Thank Gawd, no! I am stressing this because the lie of tradition is that you are 'investing' in something that you consider to be yours, and effectively trying to overcome death in the process.
I find it really funny that people give so much prominence to tradition when all it is, is habit. I could make a 'tradition' out of only bathing once a week if I wanted to... but I don't because it would be disgusting. That's why, similarly, 'traditions' based around, for example, the wearing of a certain religious symbol, or dressing in a particular manner, are often pretty stupid. Most people won't be aware of the original meaning, and many of them won't necessarily even agree, but the force of habit will hold them tight nonetheless.
Sometimes I wonder why we humans are so desperately keen to latch onto abstract notions when, much of the time, we can't be arsed to invest the time and effort to fully comprehend those abstract notions. Fucking idiots, so we are. Or are we geniuses? The whole point of making something that is so utterly abstract as to be verging on incomprehensible, is that people find it that much harder to question!
I'll finish by fielding a perhaps scandalous suggestion: maybe, oh 1st-gens, maybe your cultures are 'dying' (or so it seems to you) because you yourselves do not have sufficient awareness to teach the yoot about them properly. Or maybe they are dying because that is the natural order of things? Did I not speak earlier of 'survival of the fittest'? It can apply to the world of culture too, you know.
Personally, I believe that saying cultures are 'dying' is bullshit, especially if a lot of people are aware of their existence. A tiny mountain tribe which goes unchronicled and whose inhabitants all move away and convert to Christianity - perhaps that could be called a 'death,' but c'mon, how often does that really happen?
Another reason why I think clinging fervently to traditions is to be avoided at best is because it leads to things like the Partition of India, which involved horrific behaviour by people of all religions in the name of religion and tradition (oh, how cosily synonymous are the two on most occasions! *grimaces*). People can level all sorts of names and accusations at me, but I kind of agree with Nietzsche on this one: the world needs to indulge in a little more 'active forgetting' at times. (OBVIOUSLY some things, like the Holocaust, and indeed Partition, must never be forgotten, but they must also be remembered for the right reasons). We need to learn to let the tide of change come sweeping in, because it's always going to, whether we like it or not. Don't be making yourself look as foolish as ol' Canute did (although he did it intentionally...)!
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?!).
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Bigotry and Suffering
So here I am, hiding out in my room upstairs, as all my family bar one sister and life-long family friends enjoy themselves downstairs. When they arrived, I actually made an effort to be sociable. We talked about university and work and my plans for next year, and I was (much to my surprise) encouraged to do a Master's and think about academia, because if you can stomach all the studying, it's a pretty comfortable life. I concurred based on what I know and paused resignedly every now and again as people talked over me, interrupted me, or rushed out before I could finish what I was saying.
(Story of my life, and now you know why I vent myself crazy on this here blog!).
I was delighted to speak to a fellow English student (well... former in her case), being as I was able to exclude my sister and brother for once. That sounds bad, but growing up in a house full of medically-oriented people has had the effect that nobody respects me at all, even though I don't exactly exaggerate the importance of what I do. My sisters, when they are both here together, talk pharmacy. My brother, trainee doc that he is, sometimes joins in and if my brother-in-law is here, they talk medicine too.
So, it was a pleasure to establish a connection of my OWN for once, and to talk about Forster, Lawrence and Huxley; to hold forth on The Trial. I don't do it to say 'Look at me, I'm so clever,' but I do enjoy talking about it because it impassions me and in this family where I am a solitary alien, I never get to enjoy that. Used as I am to being babied, bullied and bitched at, for me to be able to say what I THINK and talk about things that interest ME is a rare treat indeed.
However, as I observed in the first paragraph, even that scant moment of happiness does not remain unmitigated. It was positively annihilated, however, by what came next. We shifted rooms in order to sit in the 'back room' (the extension) and there was eating and general conversation. I groaned inwardly at the sight of all the calorific treats which are in the process of making me get fat and giving me more spots than I've ever had in my whole life. I know the latter to be true from looking at pictures of myself and also from the succession of comments from my mother and sisters. My mum in particular remarked upon it almost angrily, as though it were my fault. In her head, I'm sure it is, for some roundabout reason or another.
(One plus point of the day though - I was wearing a ribbon in my hair and for once my brother didn't call me 'Gyppo' as he usually does, but I think that was only because of the guests...).
I was focussing my energies, after consuming a suitably small amount of fried nonsense, on trying to work out the fiendishly elaborate 80s Bollywood film that my dad had on as background noise. There was a sequence where a baddie kept repeatedly being 'attacked' by a falcon which had previously stolen another man's handgun which amused me no end (more genius of the utterly WTF? category)! It didn't save me though, oh no. Not even this year would I get away without having my holidays ruined by the bigotry that is almost integral to these intimate family get-togethers.
Suddenly, before I could even get a handle on where it had sprung from, the subject of the Pakistan-India tensions caught the collective imagination. The mother of the family who are our family friends (the 'children' are my sisters' age, i.e. late 20s, so the two sisters get on with my sisters and their elder brother is just kind of there, like a pot plant) remarked on how she would love for India to simply bomb Pakistan out of existence. Her son spoke up to support her.
Then, the fun kicked off and we got into some good old-fashioned Muslim-bashing. My dad said, how could you associate with people like that when you knew that they were looking at you and deciding that you had to CONVERT in order to be their friends (um, a little exaggeration there, perhaps, Pater?). The son informed us all of how it was 'their mission' to convert the whole world to Islam. For no apparent reason, the 'girls' talked about how they had seen the roads in India lined with goats when they were there 'and we asked him why and he said because it was Eid'. Cue agitated fawning all around for the poor goats that were going to be killed!
(Just like the billions of cows that die worldwide to feed people every year, but I didn't hear any railing against that. Funny really, as this family are Hindus, I would've expected to... Perchance it was because those are not just eaten by Muslims?).
There was talk of how the Arab nations are 'uncivilised' and also of how they are 'dirty.' Bollocks! cried the ghost of GCSE history from the depths of my stomach. Absolute fucking bollocks! They were advanced in medicine long before the West got a clue, and they invented geometry! As usual, however, as one of the youngest in the room and the only person who has bothered to question any of these 'hand-me-down' opinions, I knew better than to open my mouth.
Support for the complete eradication of Pakistan gathered around the room. 'Ethnic cleansing!' my sister proclaimed jauntily. In my already-twisting guts, I felt the amorphous horror of a face trying to force itself upwards, a scream trying to make itself heard. 'These are absolute dogs' the mother of the family kept repeating. All Muslims everywhere ever were blamed for the ills of the world. It was conceded by the eldest daughter that ha, now it was the whole world at their mercy. I believe the mother said something about how 50% of the population being born in India were Muslims.
Oh-so-patriotic anxiety was expressed over poor little India being surrounded, as my pater put it, by 'Bangladesh. Muslim. Pakistan. Muslim... and there's the Muslims in India!' (I managed to refrain from pointing out that Indian Muslims have themselves condemned the Mumbai attacks). Resentment was expressed about the fact that many Indian Muslims were originally, er, not Muslim (I restrained myself from mentioning that in some cases, as with the Dalits, people have voluntarily converted to Islam because they think it will improve their lives which are rigidly bound by the caste-system promoted by... errr, Hinduism and the conservative Indian culture. Also, if people are so cut up about the fact that their families 'used to be' whatever, why not convert back to that religion?).
Pakistan was roundly and repeatedly blamed and the census opinion was that nobody within its borders should live, they should all be bombed out of existence and then the world's troubles would cease! (How I itched to remark that this wouldn't really resolve the problem of the spread of the noxious Wahabbi ideology which originates from... *gasp* SAUDI ARABIA). The 'evil Muslims' seam was rich with satisfaction waiting to be mined by the roomful of my 'nearest and dearest' (ha!), as evidenced by the fact that when my sister came back in from making tea, she went 'Aww, has the Muslim-bashing stopped? Don't start again without me!' and laughed before exiting the room.
I feel depressed and terrified when this happens to me. It also makes me very, very aware of how alone I am. Often when I was younger, I would castigate myself for these feelings. While everyone else laughed blithely, content in the glow of their reductionist bigotry, I felt my innards interlacing, a near-rigor mortis of discomfort immobilising me against the wave of hate. Why did I have to be awkward? Why couldn't I just join in the anti-Muslim fun without feeling bad? Why did I see them as people and feel it almost as much as a slight against myself, when my family - people who I KNEW to be capable of moral character in other situations - had no problem with it?
The answer, ironically enough, was because I saw myself as a Sikh. Even though I am unsure about the existence of God these days, I still see myself as so bound by Sikh philosophy that even if I wanted to, I couldn't change. Yet clearly something was wrong because my family claimed to be Sikhs too. My dad is baptised and has the 5 Ks. My siblings have been much more active 'within the community' than I ever was. Yet I used to pray regularly and I still do try to treat people equally, taking the story of Bhai Kanhaiya Ji as an influence. The Gurus might have had a historical enmity with some of the Mughal rulers, but anyone with even a passing knowledge of Sikh history will be aware of the fact that this is by no means applicable to all the Mughal rulers, let alone all Muslims, plenty of whom were devotees of the Gurus! Even Guru Gobind Singh, who created the notion of the Khalsa, to which my parents cling in keeping with 'neo-Sikhism', was saved by Muslims! (Scroll down to the final paragraph to see what I'm talking about).
I'm no longer vegetarian, even though my hair remains uncut and my kara on, but I can't believe the hypocrisy of it all. This has disturbed me ever since I became aware of it, because it made me see the futility of truth before ritual. Even though, according to the BBC's 'Sikhism at a Glance,' I am a better Sikh than my family, the fact that they observe ritual more means that they have authority in the eyes of everyone else. Pathetic. As I wrote in a poem inspired by my experiences, '‘Twas the evil in my own home / to make me doubt the existence of a God.'
Yet part of me panics when I see this. Does this mean that loads and loads of people out there think like this? How alone am I? Can the world really be full of people who are ignorant and tribalist and hateful? Whenever I used to show little signs of subversion, when I was younger, my parents always disarmed me with the warning that I should 'stick to my own kind' and when I admitted to agnosticism, one of the main weapons my mother used against me was the recommendation that I should be 'part of a group' because it's 'safer' and that way you can fight against other groups. Er... isn't that the sort of mentality that's led to the apparently ever-worsening gang-related violence on our streets?
Now, in a convoluted way, my mother has a point because Sikhism is about fighting for the rights of the downtrodden and standing up for the oppressed - but I don't see what reason Sikhs have to be playing the 'victim' card as my parents so often like to do. Average Muslims could if they wanted to, but a lot of them just want to get on with their lives. I can't let that go unsaid, because I refuse to stop seeing the fact of people's humanity in favour of other categories. Does that make me a fool? And still the question circulates in my mind: who's the real Sikh here?
(Story of my life, and now you know why I vent myself crazy on this here blog!).
I was delighted to speak to a fellow English student (well... former in her case), being as I was able to exclude my sister and brother for once. That sounds bad, but growing up in a house full of medically-oriented people has had the effect that nobody respects me at all, even though I don't exactly exaggerate the importance of what I do. My sisters, when they are both here together, talk pharmacy. My brother, trainee doc that he is, sometimes joins in and if my brother-in-law is here, they talk medicine too.
So, it was a pleasure to establish a connection of my OWN for once, and to talk about Forster, Lawrence and Huxley; to hold forth on The Trial. I don't do it to say 'Look at me, I'm so clever,' but I do enjoy talking about it because it impassions me and in this family where I am a solitary alien, I never get to enjoy that. Used as I am to being babied, bullied and bitched at, for me to be able to say what I THINK and talk about things that interest ME is a rare treat indeed.
However, as I observed in the first paragraph, even that scant moment of happiness does not remain unmitigated. It was positively annihilated, however, by what came next. We shifted rooms in order to sit in the 'back room' (the extension) and there was eating and general conversation. I groaned inwardly at the sight of all the calorific treats which are in the process of making me get fat and giving me more spots than I've ever had in my whole life. I know the latter to be true from looking at pictures of myself and also from the succession of comments from my mother and sisters. My mum in particular remarked upon it almost angrily, as though it were my fault. In her head, I'm sure it is, for some roundabout reason or another.
(One plus point of the day though - I was wearing a ribbon in my hair and for once my brother didn't call me 'Gyppo' as he usually does, but I think that was only because of the guests...).
I was focussing my energies, after consuming a suitably small amount of fried nonsense, on trying to work out the fiendishly elaborate 80s Bollywood film that my dad had on as background noise. There was a sequence where a baddie kept repeatedly being 'attacked' by a falcon which had previously stolen another man's handgun which amused me no end (more genius of the utterly WTF? category)! It didn't save me though, oh no. Not even this year would I get away without having my holidays ruined by the bigotry that is almost integral to these intimate family get-togethers.
Suddenly, before I could even get a handle on where it had sprung from, the subject of the Pakistan-India tensions caught the collective imagination. The mother of the family who are our family friends (the 'children' are my sisters' age, i.e. late 20s, so the two sisters get on with my sisters and their elder brother is just kind of there, like a pot plant) remarked on how she would love for India to simply bomb Pakistan out of existence. Her son spoke up to support her.
Then, the fun kicked off and we got into some good old-fashioned Muslim-bashing. My dad said, how could you associate with people like that when you knew that they were looking at you and deciding that you had to CONVERT in order to be their friends (um, a little exaggeration there, perhaps, Pater?). The son informed us all of how it was 'their mission' to convert the whole world to Islam. For no apparent reason, the 'girls' talked about how they had seen the roads in India lined with goats when they were there 'and we asked him why and he said because it was Eid'. Cue agitated fawning all around for the poor goats that were going to be killed!
(Just like the billions of cows that die worldwide to feed people every year, but I didn't hear any railing against that. Funny really, as this family are Hindus, I would've expected to... Perchance it was because those are not just eaten by Muslims?).
There was talk of how the Arab nations are 'uncivilised' and also of how they are 'dirty.' Bollocks! cried the ghost of GCSE history from the depths of my stomach. Absolute fucking bollocks! They were advanced in medicine long before the West got a clue, and they invented geometry! As usual, however, as one of the youngest in the room and the only person who has bothered to question any of these 'hand-me-down' opinions, I knew better than to open my mouth.
Support for the complete eradication of Pakistan gathered around the room. 'Ethnic cleansing!' my sister proclaimed jauntily. In my already-twisting guts, I felt the amorphous horror of a face trying to force itself upwards, a scream trying to make itself heard. 'These are absolute dogs' the mother of the family kept repeating. All Muslims everywhere ever were blamed for the ills of the world. It was conceded by the eldest daughter that ha, now it was the whole world at their mercy. I believe the mother said something about how 50% of the population being born in India were Muslims.
Oh-so-patriotic anxiety was expressed over poor little India being surrounded, as my pater put it, by 'Bangladesh. Muslim. Pakistan. Muslim... and there's the Muslims in India!' (I managed to refrain from pointing out that Indian Muslims have themselves condemned the Mumbai attacks). Resentment was expressed about the fact that many Indian Muslims were originally, er, not Muslim (I restrained myself from mentioning that in some cases, as with the Dalits, people have voluntarily converted to Islam because they think it will improve their lives which are rigidly bound by the caste-system promoted by... errr, Hinduism and the conservative Indian culture. Also, if people are so cut up about the fact that their families 'used to be' whatever, why not convert back to that religion?).
Pakistan was roundly and repeatedly blamed and the census opinion was that nobody within its borders should live, they should all be bombed out of existence and then the world's troubles would cease! (How I itched to remark that this wouldn't really resolve the problem of the spread of the noxious Wahabbi ideology which originates from... *gasp* SAUDI ARABIA). The 'evil Muslims' seam was rich with satisfaction waiting to be mined by the roomful of my 'nearest and dearest' (ha!), as evidenced by the fact that when my sister came back in from making tea, she went 'Aww, has the Muslim-bashing stopped? Don't start again without me!' and laughed before exiting the room.
I feel depressed and terrified when this happens to me. It also makes me very, very aware of how alone I am. Often when I was younger, I would castigate myself for these feelings. While everyone else laughed blithely, content in the glow of their reductionist bigotry, I felt my innards interlacing, a near-rigor mortis of discomfort immobilising me against the wave of hate. Why did I have to be awkward? Why couldn't I just join in the anti-Muslim fun without feeling bad? Why did I see them as people and feel it almost as much as a slight against myself, when my family - people who I KNEW to be capable of moral character in other situations - had no problem with it?
The answer, ironically enough, was because I saw myself as a Sikh. Even though I am unsure about the existence of God these days, I still see myself as so bound by Sikh philosophy that even if I wanted to, I couldn't change. Yet clearly something was wrong because my family claimed to be Sikhs too. My dad is baptised and has the 5 Ks. My siblings have been much more active 'within the community' than I ever was. Yet I used to pray regularly and I still do try to treat people equally, taking the story of Bhai Kanhaiya Ji as an influence. The Gurus might have had a historical enmity with some of the Mughal rulers, but anyone with even a passing knowledge of Sikh history will be aware of the fact that this is by no means applicable to all the Mughal rulers, let alone all Muslims, plenty of whom were devotees of the Gurus! Even Guru Gobind Singh, who created the notion of the Khalsa, to which my parents cling in keeping with 'neo-Sikhism', was saved by Muslims! (Scroll down to the final paragraph to see what I'm talking about).
I'm no longer vegetarian, even though my hair remains uncut and my kara on, but I can't believe the hypocrisy of it all. This has disturbed me ever since I became aware of it, because it made me see the futility of truth before ritual. Even though, according to the BBC's 'Sikhism at a Glance,' I am a better Sikh than my family, the fact that they observe ritual more means that they have authority in the eyes of everyone else. Pathetic. As I wrote in a poem inspired by my experiences, '‘Twas the evil in my own home / to make me doubt the existence of a God.'
Yet part of me panics when I see this. Does this mean that loads and loads of people out there think like this? How alone am I? Can the world really be full of people who are ignorant and tribalist and hateful? Whenever I used to show little signs of subversion, when I was younger, my parents always disarmed me with the warning that I should 'stick to my own kind' and when I admitted to agnosticism, one of the main weapons my mother used against me was the recommendation that I should be 'part of a group' because it's 'safer' and that way you can fight against other groups. Er... isn't that the sort of mentality that's led to the apparently ever-worsening gang-related violence on our streets?
Now, in a convoluted way, my mother has a point because Sikhism is about fighting for the rights of the downtrodden and standing up for the oppressed - but I don't see what reason Sikhs have to be playing the 'victim' card as my parents so often like to do. Average Muslims could if they wanted to, but a lot of them just want to get on with their lives. I can't let that go unsaid, because I refuse to stop seeing the fact of people's humanity in favour of other categories. Does that make me a fool? And still the question circulates in my mind: who's the real Sikh here?
Saturday, December 27, 2008
The Littlest Love Letter
Er - blame Girls Aloud for this.
DRAMA! Will anybody work out the 'sting in the tail' of my poem? Stay tuned to the comments section to find out!
The Littlest Love Letter
I saw you turn your head away on the street.
The bubbles of laughter worked their way
Rhythmically to the surface, the ground seemingly no match
For your feet, as you tottered and bounced with mirth.
Wind tossing your hair everywhere as though it were
Handfuls of cocoa powder exploding about your cheeks –
For you were long gone into the minute private sphere
Of your feverishly-active imagination; hopeful
Gaze recording an entirely separate vision
To the bemused strollers fading tonelessly away
Beside you, deep jade showing here and there,
Against your almond-milk face as it hid amongst your hair –
Such vocal eyes you had! The pebbled glint of curiosity
Speaks from them; not a hint of malice, but the black
Fringing of your lashes suggested childishness
As you giggled, and the fading pink of your mouth
Seemed to touch your cheeks, and I wanted to kiss you,
I wanted to fold my arms around the body
That seemed so much smaller and more graceful
When seen in his eyes than when I saw it,
Loaded with conflict, in the mirror each day.
Friday, December 26, 2008
Sarah Palin Offers An Uneasy Glimpse of The Future...
Taken from here. Good Lord.
'I see you as president.' 'Maybe in eight years,' says Sarah Palin
- The Guardian, Tuesday 4 November 2008
- Article history
This is an edited transcript of Saturday's conversation between Sarah Palin and comedian Marc-Antoine Audette of Montreal radio station CKOI, posing as Nicolas Sarkozy.
SP: This is Sarah ...
MAA: This is Nicolas Sarkozy speaking, how are you?
SP: Oh, so good. It's so good to hear you. Thank you for calling us.
MAA: Oh, it's a pleasure.
SP: Thank you sir, we have such great respect for you, John McCain and I. We love you! And thank you for taking a few minutes to talk to me.
MAA: I follow your campaigns closely with my special American adviser Johnny Hallyday [a French singer], you know?
SP: Yes! Good ...
MAA: You know I see you as a president one day, you too.
SP: Maybe in eight years.
MAA: Well, I hope for you. You know, we have a lot in common because personally one of my favourite activities is to hunt, too.
SP: Oh, very good. We should go hunting together.
MAA: Exactly, we could go try hunting by helicopter like you did. I never did that. Like we say in French, on pourrait tuer des bébés phoques, aussi [we could kill baby seals, too].
SP: Well, I think we could have a lot of fun together as we're getting work done. We can kill two birds with one stone that way.
MAA: I just love killing those animals. Mmm, mmm, take away life, that is so fun. I'd really love to go, as long as we don't bring Vice-President Cheney.
SP: No, I'll be a careful shot, yes.
MAA: Yes, you know we have a lot in common also, except that from my house I can see Belgium. That's kind of less interesting than you.
SP: Well, see, we're right next door to different countries that we all need to be working with, yes.
MAA: Some people said in the last days, and I thought that was mean, that you weren't experienced enough in foreign relations and you know that's completely false. That's the thing that I said to my great friend, the prime minister of Canada, Stef Carse [a Canadian singer].
SP: Well, he's doing fine, too, and yeah, when you come into a position underestimated it gives you an opportunity to prove the pundits and the critics wrong. You work that much harder.
MAA: I was wondering because you are so next to him, one of my good friends also, the prime minister of Quebec, Mr Richard Z Sirois [a Canadian comedian], have you met him recently? Did he come to one of your rallies?
SP: I haven't seen him at one of the rallies but it's been great working with the Canadian officials in my role as governor . . . You know, I look forward to working with you and getting to meet you personally and your beautiful wife. Oh my goodness, you've added a lot of energy to your country with that beautiful family of yours.
MAA: Thank you very much. You know my wife Carla would love to meet you . . . even though she was a bit jealous that I was supposed to speak to you today.
SP: Well, give her a big hug from me.
MAA: You know my wife is a popular singer and a former top model and she's so hot in bed. She even wrote a song for you.
SP: Oh my goodness, I didn't know that.
MAA: Yes, in French it's called De Rouge à Lèvre sur un Cochon [Lipstick on a Pig], or if you prefer in English, Joe the Plumber [sings] it's his life . . . I don't quite understand the phenomenon Joe the Plumber. That's not your husband, right?
SP: That's not my husband but he's a normal American who just works hard and doesn't want the government to take his money.
MAA: Yes, yes, I understand we have the equivalent of Joe the Plumber in France. It's called Marcel, the guy with bread under his armpit.
SP: Right, that's what it's all about, the middle class and government needing to work for them. You're a very good example for us here ...
MAA: I must say Governor Palin, I love the documentary they made on your life. You know Hustler's Nailin' Paylin?
SP: Oh, good, thank you, yes.
MAA: That was really edgy.
SP: Well, good.
MAA: I really loved you and I must say something also, governor, you've been pranked by the Masked Avengers. We are two comedians from Montreal.
SP: Oh, have we been pranked? And what radio station is this?
MAA: CKOI in Montreal.
SP: In Montreal? Tell me the radio station call letters.
MAA: CK ... hello?
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Headscarves and Turbans
Quite some time ago, I said that I would reveal what I thought about girls who wear headscarves (at my university). I'm not going to focus just on the laydeez though - the menz will also be getting a bit of a rollicking.
It must be said that I am not targeting all girls in headscarves either. Just a lot of them.
It has struck me recently that there is so much fundamental dishonesty in the world. That sounds really naive, but I don't mean it in some 'child-opening-eyes-to-harsh-reality' way. I mean it in the sense that it is stunning how much of human existence can essentially be boiled down to power struggles - people trying to claim authority over each other. Yet a lot of the time the subject of the power struggles is often misunderstood or misrepresented, and hence those arguing over it are, if you will, arguing over something that does not actually exist. They are trying to generate authenticity out of inauthenticity, and in the process basing themselves and what they stand for - their identities - around a lie.
Let us invoke a 'trendy' example here: Islam and the arguments between Sunnis and Shias, or between Wahabbis and pretty much every other type of Muslim (:-D). It's not just Islam though that has this problem - pretty much every religion based around a text of some sort has this problem to some extent.
If you haven't already, look at my blog header. It is a quote from that wonderfully disturbed man, Franz Kafka. I am not, and did not, choose that in order to come across as intellectual (ffs, I read the book for a university course... I'm not the sort of person who reads 'classics' for fun unless they're relatively humorous. Yes, yes, I know. Sacrilege!). I chose it because it struck me as so very true. Thanks to ol' man Nietzsche and others of his ilk, I've come to rethink what that means. Now, when I think something is 'true,' what I really mean, I suppose is that for me, it is very applicable.
'The written word is unalterable, and opinions are often only an expression of despair.' I would gladly renounce all hope of ever being a real writer if I could produce such a phrase. Staggeringly obvious, but like the most accurate observations, it needs to be pointed out to us. I can't help thinking that if only more people kept this in mind, the world could well become a more sensible place. I'm not a fucking 'punk rocker with flowers in my hair' nor am I wishing for 'world peace' like a beauty pageant contestant, I just wish for a little more pensiveness, please.
Once something has been printed/published - that is IT. It takes on a life of its own. To borrow a Freudian term, it becomes 'uncanny.' I was thinking about it and I surmised at first that perhaps at the heart of our power struggles lies the desire to 'be or beat' the author. Maybe the power struggles are nothing but an expression of collective frustration at the fact that the author has 'got one' over us and an unconscious acknowledgement that we would like to be in their position. I mean, look at the way educational progress works. We do not learn and learn - the aim of accumulating knowledge is to reach the position of knowledge-provider ourselves in most instances. Think of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, and how much it applies to all of humanity; all our learning is but an attempt to take a swipe at God.
However, the printed text will survive after its author's death. It will outlive them, and even in their own lifetime, it will defy them. All their manicured intent will not be able to forge a 'pure' work that has only one understanding to it. Some critics and reviewers will see what they were aiming to do in their work; others will draw entirely new strains of meaning from it. It is their legacy; much as other people have children.
People like to think that their children, sharing their genetic matter as they do, will turn out to be, if not carbon copies, at least startling likenesses of the originals. Not so! as anyone with half a brain knows. Works of art are no less wayward. They must be as receptive to the egos of others as they are to the ego of their creator; otherwise they will not survive over time.
Therein lies an irony: you work and work and create yourself a monument, yet after all your efforts it defies you. It refuses to behave as told, to conform exactly. It is 'uncanny,' because as soon as it leaves your mind and becomes apparent, it takes on an authority of its own and perhaps even robs you of your authorial authority. You can't tell it what to do. Nobody can tell it what to do - and then the problems start because it tells others what to do.
People are base, lowly creatures fashioned out of clay who fail to do justice to that glorious organ in their heads that rules them. If ever there was a 'God,' it ought to be the human brain. Look at what the human brain can do! However, if we can't even respect the capacities of our own brains, then we haven't got much chance of remembering that texts are living things. They don't belong to the author any more than they belong to the reader; they live in the middle ground between intent and interpretation and we would do well to remember this and get the hell over ourselves.
So. Intro over.
What with this insecurity that surrounds texts, religious and otherwise, people need SOMETHING to cling to. Enter ritual and symbolism. What yuman beans really like, is habit and routine. I think it is hardwired into our biology, but I'm not certain. Even those who seek variety need this to some extent in order to be less aware of the passage of time and our mortality.
I don't really approve of the laziness that induces us to cling to things out of sentimentality in such a way, but I understand why people do and I understand how terrifying it can be to suddenly let slip a whole set of beliefs, no matter how half-baked, and have to start again with a blank canvas on the world. I'd venture to say here that while liberation is generally good, it definitely ain't easy yo.
All this is why, when I see girls at my uni wafting about in their hijabs, I feel... ambiguous. Depending on what they look like, my thoughts tend to run thus: either 'Oh' or 'How fuckin' stupid. What a fuckin' stupid shame.' Quite often the former runs into the latter. If the girl in question looks like a fully-paid up devout Muslim: baggily covered, has a hint of a moustache (sorry ladies, but if you do, you do) and is bare-faced (and quite often looks dead-eyed, although I'm sure I do too), I think to myself that I don't really know how much of a believer she is. Maybe she wants to do her eyebrows and wear lipgloss, but maybe she can't. Maybe she really DOES believe that she is the Satan-sin of Temptation personified and/or see the gaze of others as a threat - if so, that's a damn shame.
However, when I see what my friend Ala (and others) have described as 'muhajababes' (oh go on, read Ala's post, it's short, concisely-written and well-explained!), I just think: 'How fuckin' stupid. What a fuckin' stupid shame' because it is a stupid shame. They are a visual lie to me. Here are girls who want to be regular girls, wearing make-up and tight clothes and accessorising fit to outshine even the scantiest-clad girl - and suddenly a hijab obscures their hair and neck. The pointlessness of it is what always astounds me. Human sexuality cannot be regulated. People always try and do so; in some respects (i.e. paedophilia, incest, etc.) this is laudable. In many ways, it's also quite a hopeless exercise, like trying to rid the world of all its rats. Purge in one place, and there will be an upsurge elsewhere.
When I see these girls, or boys with turbans which hide their cut hair - or they have carefully shaved and groomed beards - I find it stupid and dishonest. Some of them will perhaps want to continue as they are, no doubt. However, I want to shake a lot of these people and ask them to think and sleep on it a bit. What kind of ludicrousness is that? Evidently they are doing it so that their parents and relatives can look upon them and see the symbol, see the visual affirmation of faith.
(I once saw a woman on the Tube who had short hair - neck-length, tons of make-up on and I don't know whether her eyebrows were partially drawn on or what, but I noticed she had a very fucking big tattoo of a khanda on her forearm. I have no idea whether she was wearing a kara or not, but I don't remember seeing one...)
Yet, like texts, the person may well be trapped in the middle - caught between the symbol and those that demand it. They may think the symbol is a concession to their parents/relatives; in fact, the parents/relatives tend to see it as a promise and a testimony. It tells them that you have faith and locks you in to their system of belief, and if you don't, it's a lie - once again - that everything is hinging on. Take a stand! Don't let yourself be suffocated by something that you thought you were in control of!
Then again, some people are so unable to handle the abstract as the abstract that they will literalise everything. They are people with no imagination and no inquisitivity, and they will not accept the view of sexuality I have just mentioned. They will cry vermin and keep stamping until there is blood. Their failure to accept the fact of sexuality's omnipresence will result in them turning, like so many desperately unimaginative bastards, to murdering their children in that most well-known of rituals, the 'honour' killing. The term 'control killing' as has been proposed, is much better. See, 'control killing' makes me think of Rentokil, which makes me think of vermin, which leads me back to my metaphor. Such bastards - being as they are, probably consumed with personal guilt and shame for whatever reasons - will seize upon the separate existence and snuff out its life in a pathetic and futile attempt to protect their lie.
Lo, we have returned to the power struggles of which I spoke at the beginning, and so it is that books are burned and women are killed for the sake of people's authority. Shame on you. Grow the fuck up. If you were truly people of religion and honour, you would accept that all things belong to God, and that ultimately it is only God's decision to exercise judgement. Monica Ali - an author who faced the threat of book-burning in this day and age - helped in the production of this post, pointing out as she did via Brick Lane that it really is not just fear, but also laziness, that drives people to stay with a certain ideology. I mean, ferChrissakes, the main character is not afraid to have an affair, even though she hasn't guts enough to stop praying despite not really seeming to believe in religion! A special mention must also go to Marcel Proust, upon whom I had to write a 2, 500 word essay, which I did 2, 000 words of in one day. Thank you.Thank you very fucking much.
The moral of the rant may be that art of all kinds and children are much more alike than you ever wanted to realise, and that you don't own nuttin'. Don't let this capitalist, property-appropriating world fool you, y'hear? ;-D As if the recent recession and allegations of fraud didn't make that clear enough already. As an absolute genius of a man once said: 'Money ain't got no owners; only spenders.'
To finish in an Omar-ian vein: MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR, YO!
It must be said that I am not targeting all girls in headscarves either. Just a lot of them.
It has struck me recently that there is so much fundamental dishonesty in the world. That sounds really naive, but I don't mean it in some 'child-opening-eyes-to-harsh-reality' way. I mean it in the sense that it is stunning how much of human existence can essentially be boiled down to power struggles - people trying to claim authority over each other. Yet a lot of the time the subject of the power struggles is often misunderstood or misrepresented, and hence those arguing over it are, if you will, arguing over something that does not actually exist. They are trying to generate authenticity out of inauthenticity, and in the process basing themselves and what they stand for - their identities - around a lie.
Let us invoke a 'trendy' example here: Islam and the arguments between Sunnis and Shias, or between Wahabbis and pretty much every other type of Muslim (:-D). It's not just Islam though that has this problem - pretty much every religion based around a text of some sort has this problem to some extent.
If you haven't already, look at my blog header. It is a quote from that wonderfully disturbed man, Franz Kafka. I am not, and did not, choose that in order to come across as intellectual (ffs, I read the book for a university course... I'm not the sort of person who reads 'classics' for fun unless they're relatively humorous. Yes, yes, I know. Sacrilege!). I chose it because it struck me as so very true. Thanks to ol' man Nietzsche and others of his ilk, I've come to rethink what that means. Now, when I think something is 'true,' what I really mean, I suppose is that for me, it is very applicable.
'The written word is unalterable, and opinions are often only an expression of despair.' I would gladly renounce all hope of ever being a real writer if I could produce such a phrase. Staggeringly obvious, but like the most accurate observations, it needs to be pointed out to us. I can't help thinking that if only more people kept this in mind, the world could well become a more sensible place. I'm not a fucking 'punk rocker with flowers in my hair' nor am I wishing for 'world peace' like a beauty pageant contestant, I just wish for a little more pensiveness, please.
Once something has been printed/published - that is IT. It takes on a life of its own. To borrow a Freudian term, it becomes 'uncanny.' I was thinking about it and I surmised at first that perhaps at the heart of our power struggles lies the desire to 'be or beat' the author. Maybe the power struggles are nothing but an expression of collective frustration at the fact that the author has 'got one' over us and an unconscious acknowledgement that we would like to be in their position. I mean, look at the way educational progress works. We do not learn and learn - the aim of accumulating knowledge is to reach the position of knowledge-provider ourselves in most instances. Think of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, and how much it applies to all of humanity; all our learning is but an attempt to take a swipe at God.
However, the printed text will survive after its author's death. It will outlive them, and even in their own lifetime, it will defy them. All their manicured intent will not be able to forge a 'pure' work that has only one understanding to it. Some critics and reviewers will see what they were aiming to do in their work; others will draw entirely new strains of meaning from it. It is their legacy; much as other people have children.
People like to think that their children, sharing their genetic matter as they do, will turn out to be, if not carbon copies, at least startling likenesses of the originals. Not so! as anyone with half a brain knows. Works of art are no less wayward. They must be as receptive to the egos of others as they are to the ego of their creator; otherwise they will not survive over time.
Therein lies an irony: you work and work and create yourself a monument, yet after all your efforts it defies you. It refuses to behave as told, to conform exactly. It is 'uncanny,' because as soon as it leaves your mind and becomes apparent, it takes on an authority of its own and perhaps even robs you of your authorial authority. You can't tell it what to do. Nobody can tell it what to do - and then the problems start because it tells others what to do.
People are base, lowly creatures fashioned out of clay who fail to do justice to that glorious organ in their heads that rules them. If ever there was a 'God,' it ought to be the human brain. Look at what the human brain can do! However, if we can't even respect the capacities of our own brains, then we haven't got much chance of remembering that texts are living things. They don't belong to the author any more than they belong to the reader; they live in the middle ground between intent and interpretation and we would do well to remember this and get the hell over ourselves.
So. Intro over.
What with this insecurity that surrounds texts, religious and otherwise, people need SOMETHING to cling to. Enter ritual and symbolism. What yuman beans really like, is habit and routine. I think it is hardwired into our biology, but I'm not certain. Even those who seek variety need this to some extent in order to be less aware of the passage of time and our mortality.
I don't really approve of the laziness that induces us to cling to things out of sentimentality in such a way, but I understand why people do and I understand how terrifying it can be to suddenly let slip a whole set of beliefs, no matter how half-baked, and have to start again with a blank canvas on the world. I'd venture to say here that while liberation is generally good, it definitely ain't easy yo.
All this is why, when I see girls at my uni wafting about in their hijabs, I feel... ambiguous. Depending on what they look like, my thoughts tend to run thus: either 'Oh' or 'How fuckin' stupid. What a fuckin' stupid shame.' Quite often the former runs into the latter. If the girl in question looks like a fully-paid up devout Muslim: baggily covered, has a hint of a moustache (sorry ladies, but if you do, you do) and is bare-faced (and quite often looks dead-eyed, although I'm sure I do too), I think to myself that I don't really know how much of a believer she is. Maybe she wants to do her eyebrows and wear lipgloss, but maybe she can't. Maybe she really DOES believe that she is the Satan-sin of Temptation personified and/or see the gaze of others as a threat - if so, that's a damn shame.
However, when I see what my friend Ala (and others) have described as 'muhajababes' (oh go on, read Ala's post, it's short, concisely-written and well-explained!), I just think: 'How fuckin' stupid. What a fuckin' stupid shame' because it is a stupid shame. They are a visual lie to me. Here are girls who want to be regular girls, wearing make-up and tight clothes and accessorising fit to outshine even the scantiest-clad girl - and suddenly a hijab obscures their hair and neck. The pointlessness of it is what always astounds me. Human sexuality cannot be regulated. People always try and do so; in some respects (i.e. paedophilia, incest, etc.) this is laudable. In many ways, it's also quite a hopeless exercise, like trying to rid the world of all its rats. Purge in one place, and there will be an upsurge elsewhere.
When I see these girls, or boys with turbans which hide their cut hair - or they have carefully shaved and groomed beards - I find it stupid and dishonest. Some of them will perhaps want to continue as they are, no doubt. However, I want to shake a lot of these people and ask them to think and sleep on it a bit. What kind of ludicrousness is that? Evidently they are doing it so that their parents and relatives can look upon them and see the symbol, see the visual affirmation of faith.
(I once saw a woman on the Tube who had short hair - neck-length, tons of make-up on and I don't know whether her eyebrows were partially drawn on or what, but I noticed she had a very fucking big tattoo of a khanda on her forearm. I have no idea whether she was wearing a kara or not, but I don't remember seeing one...)
Yet, like texts, the person may well be trapped in the middle - caught between the symbol and those that demand it. They may think the symbol is a concession to their parents/relatives; in fact, the parents/relatives tend to see it as a promise and a testimony. It tells them that you have faith and locks you in to their system of belief, and if you don't, it's a lie - once again - that everything is hinging on. Take a stand! Don't let yourself be suffocated by something that you thought you were in control of!
Then again, some people are so unable to handle the abstract as the abstract that they will literalise everything. They are people with no imagination and no inquisitivity, and they will not accept the view of sexuality I have just mentioned. They will cry vermin and keep stamping until there is blood. Their failure to accept the fact of sexuality's omnipresence will result in them turning, like so many desperately unimaginative bastards, to murdering their children in that most well-known of rituals, the 'honour' killing. The term 'control killing' as has been proposed, is much better. See, 'control killing' makes me think of Rentokil, which makes me think of vermin, which leads me back to my metaphor. Such bastards - being as they are, probably consumed with personal guilt and shame for whatever reasons - will seize upon the separate existence and snuff out its life in a pathetic and futile attempt to protect their lie.
Lo, we have returned to the power struggles of which I spoke at the beginning, and so it is that books are burned and women are killed for the sake of people's authority. Shame on you. Grow the fuck up. If you were truly people of religion and honour, you would accept that all things belong to God, and that ultimately it is only God's decision to exercise judgement. Monica Ali - an author who faced the threat of book-burning in this day and age - helped in the production of this post, pointing out as she did via Brick Lane that it really is not just fear, but also laziness, that drives people to stay with a certain ideology. I mean, ferChrissakes, the main character is not afraid to have an affair, even though she hasn't guts enough to stop praying despite not really seeming to believe in religion! A special mention must also go to Marcel Proust, upon whom I had to write a 2, 500 word essay, which I did 2, 000 words of in one day. Thank you.Thank you very fucking much.
The moral of the rant may be that art of all kinds and children are much more alike than you ever wanted to realise, and that you don't own nuttin'. Don't let this capitalist, property-appropriating world fool you, y'hear? ;-D As if the recent recession and allegations of fraud didn't make that clear enough already. As an absolute genius of a man once said: 'Money ain't got no owners; only spenders.'
To finish in an Omar-ian vein: MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR, YO!
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