Strange Shores

Notes on being in the world

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Master or servant

We are adult because of that brief moment when one day it fell to our lot to live when we had looked at the things of the world as if for the last time, when we had renounced our possession of them and returned them to the will of God: and suddenly the things of the world appeared to us in their just place beneath the sky, and the human beings too, and we who looked at them from the just place that is given to us: human being, objects and memories — everything appeared to us in its just place beneath the sky. In that brief moment we found a point of equilibrium for our wavering life: and it seemed to us that we could always rediscover that secret moment and find there the words for our vocation, for our neighbour; that we could look at our neighbour with a gaze that would always be just and free, not the timid or contemptuous gaze of someone who whenever he is with his neighbour always asks himself if he is his master or his servant. All our life we have only known how to be masters and servants: but in that secret moment of ours, in our moment of perfect equilibrium, we have realized that there is no real authority or servitude on the earth. 

– Natalia Ginzburg, “Human Relationships”

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The ultimate capitalist machine

Source

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Argumentum Ornithologicum

I close my eyes and see a flock of birds. The vision lasts a second or perhaps less; I don’t know how many birds I saw. Were they a definite or an indefinite number? This problem involves the question of the existence of God. If God exists, the number is definite, because how many birds I saw is known to God. If God does not exist, the number is indefinite, because nobody was able to take count. In this case, I saw fewer than ten birds (let’s say) and more than one; but I did not see nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, or two birds. I saw a number between ten and one, but not nine, eight, seven, six, five, etc. That number, as a whole number, is inconceivable; ergo, God exists.

– Jorge Luis Borges, Dreamtigers (trans. Mildred Boyer)

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The idiotic truth of materialism

“Seeing the swallows flying through the summer evening air, I tell myself, thinking painfully of maman: how barbarous not to believe in souls — in the immorality of souls! the idiotic truth of materialism!”

– Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary

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What harm is there in us?

In the hall of mirrors, nobody speaks. An ember smolders before hollowed cheeks. Someone empties his pockets, loose change and keys, into a locker. My God forgives me. Some say love, disclosed, repels what it sees, yet if I touch the darkness, it touches me. In the steam room, inconsolable tears fall against us. In the whirlpool, my arms, rowing through little green crests, help to steer the body, riding against death. Yet what harm is there in us? I swear to you, my friend, cross-armed in a bright beach towel, turning round to see my face in the lamplight, that eye, ear, and tongue, good things, make something sweet of fear.

– Henri Cole, "The Roman Baths at Nîmes”

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The thing itself

“Two resolute, sunburnt, dusty girls in jerseys and short skirts, with packs on their backs, city clerks or secretaries, tramping along the road in hot sunshine at Ripe. My instinct at once throws up a screen, which condemns them: I think them in every way angular, awkward and self-assertive. But all this is a great mistake. These screens shut me out. Have no screens, for screens are made out of our own integument; and get at the thing itself, which has nothing whatever in common with a screen. The screen-making habit, though, is so universal that probably it preserves our sanity. If we had not this device for shutting people off from our sympathies we might perhaps dissolve utterly; separateness would be impossible. But the screens are in the excess; not the sympathy.” 

– Virginia Woolf, Diary (July 25th, 1926)

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Ashes to ashes, dust to stardust

It’s that moment at 2:07, when he cocks his hip, that gets you. The defiance, the resignation in the gesture. The quotation marks around it. He always had it both ways. And still so beautiful! In the moment after that moment you can’t help thinking impossible thoughts.

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Rembrandt, selfies, and the double-bind

“[I]f we want to get closer to what makes the late self-portraits so exceptional, we have to relate them to the rest of the genre....

“In most self-portraits... play acting or dissimulation was endemic. And there is a phenomenological reason for this. A painter can draw his left hand as if it belonged to somebody else. Using two mirrors he can draw his profile as if observing a stranger. But when he looks straight into a mirror, he is caught in a trap: his reaction to the face he is seeing changes that face. Or, to put it another way, that face can offer itself something it likes or loves. The face arranges itself. Caravaggio’s painting of Narcissus is a perfect demonstration.

“It is the same for all of us. We play-act when we look in the bathroom mirror, we instantly make an adjustment to our expression and our face. Quite apart from the reversal of the left and right, nobody ever sees us as we see ourselves above the washbasin. And this dissimulation is spontaneous and uncalculated. It’s as old as the invention of the mirror.

“Throughout the history of self-portraits a similar ‘look’ occurs again and again. If the face is not hidden in a group, one can recognize a self-portrait a mile off, because of its particular kind of theatricality. We watch Dürer playing Christ, Gauguin playing the outcast, Delacroix the dandy, the young Rembrandt the successful  Amsterdam trader. We can be moved as if by overhearing a confession, or amused as by a boast. Yet before most self-portraits, because of the exclusive complicity existing between the eye observing and the returned gaze, we have a sense of something opaque, the sense of watching the drama of the double-bind which excludes us….

“I believe [Rembrandt] used a mirror only at the beginning of each canvas. Then he put a cloth over it, and worked and reworked the canvas until the painting began to correspond to an image of himself which had been left behind after a lifetime. This image was not generalised, it was very specific. Each time he made a portrait he chose what to wear. Each time he was highly aware of how his face, his stance, his appearance had changed. He studied the damage unflinchingly. Yet, at a certain moment, he covered the mirror so that he no longer had to adjust his gaze to his gaze, and then he continued to paint only from what was left behind inside him. Freed from the double-bind, he was sustained by a vague hope, an intuition, that later it would be others who would look at him with a compassion that he could not allow himself.”

– John Berger, from The Shape of a Pocket

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Consider the octopus

“Consider its anatomy: the “head,” a sack resembling a human scrotum that can shift through the entire color spectrum; the three hearts pumping blood that contains copper rather than iron; the eyes so very like human ones and yet radically more elegant in design. In a celebrated poem Ogden Nash begs the octopus to tell him if its limbs are arms or legs. Textbooks have a no-nonsense answer: they are arms, not legs (and emphatically not tentacles). But super tongues would be at least as good. Each octopus arm is a muscular hydrostat, like a human tongue, and each of the tens or hundreds of suckers on it is lined with tens of thousands of chemoreceptors—taste buds to you and me—and a comparable number of nerve endings that provide an exquisite sense of touch.

“Or consider its intelligence: In experiments carried out with the Common octopuses, individuals are faced with five opaque doors, only one of which has a crab, which they love to eat, hidden behind it. Different symbols are visible on each door. After a few tries, the octopus accidentally chooses the correct symbol. In subsequent trials, the octopus quickly recognizes the symbol and opens the correct door, even when they are all moved around. If a crab is placed behind a door with a different symbol the octopus quickly learns the new symbol. In other experiments octopuses have shown ability to distinguish symbols about as well as a three- or four-year-old child.

[ . . . ]

“Their intelligence is all the more striking because it has evolved completely independently of the line that gave rise to us: our last common ancestor—perhaps some simple, slug-like creature—lived well over 540 million year ago. Humans are more closely related to starfish and sea cucumbers. And yet across a chasm in evolutionary time we encounter a creature with some striking resemblances to ourselves: a mind that calculates and even, perhaps, possesses a form of awareness. In some ways, their abilities surpass ours.”

From The Book of Barely Imagined Beings, by Caspar Henderson

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The unity of experience

“The fact that such common locutions as “my leg,” “my eye,” “my brain,” and even “my body” exist suggest that we believe there is some non-material, perhaps fictive, entity that stands in the relation of possessor to possessed to the body’s “parts” and even to the whole body. Or else the existence of such locutions shows that language cannot get purchase, cannot get going, until it has split up the unity of experience.”

– J.M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year

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The Last Iceberg

“I remember shaking, seeing this massive thing that was probably half the size of Manhattan. . . I had to think that this was one snowflake on top of another snowflake, year after year, for many thousands or millions of years before here it is standing before me.”

— Photographer Camille Seaman on her iceberg portraits.

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Before I go

“Yet one person cannot be robbed of her futurity: my daughter, Cady. I hope I’ll live long enough that she has some memory of me. Words have a longevity I do not. I had thought I could leave her a series of letters – but what would they really say? I don’t know what this girl will be like when she is 15; I don’t even know if she’ll take to the nickname we’ve given her. There is perhaps only one thing to say to this infant, who is all future, overlapping briefly with me, whose life, barring the improbable, is all but past. “That message is simple. When you come to one of the many moments in life when you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more, but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.”

– Paul Kalanithi (1977-2015), from “Before I go”

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“How fortunate are trees which love light”

What’s striking about this gallery of posters from Tehran’s metro stations, all commissioned by the transit authority’s department of culture and society, is the odd mix of the religious and the banal, the xenophobic and the progressive, the funny and the deadly serious. 

One sign compares Barack Obama to a chimpanzee; another extols the virtues of martyrdom. Others talk about the importance of separating your garbage, observing escalator etiquette, and recognizing Iran’s Jewish community. My favourite is the poster above. Translated, it reads something like this:

‘Humans are funny creatures. We destroy jungles, fields and rivers and build cities, towns and villages. Then we long for nature so we design artificial parks, lakes and fountains. We’ve failed to be frugal in our use of paper which may mean the end of more trees. Let’s take pleasure in looking at trees rather than posters of trees’

Together they convey Iran’s many contradictions and complexities better than any well-meaning editorial could. 

[strange-shores]

The value of human personality

The artist tries, Nietzsche once wrote, to exaggerate the value of human personality. This is a secular notion, for on the assumption that God exists a religious writer would deny that such exaggeration was possible. But novelists have been largely secular men in secular, doubting times. If we consider the humanistic art of the Renaissance that Nietzsche probably had in mind, and its near-divine creatures, we can agree with him. It made the human image very great. But even then there were doubts about the unaccommodated poor, bare, forked animal, and since then the value of man has depreciated. We see the doubt in Don Quixote. Are nobility and great virtue delusions? Can there ever be a time when ecstasy will be the daily spirit and men and things be set in diamonds? Cervantes investigates what it means to will the highest and to insist on a superior reality. This contrast of a superior reality with daily fact is the peculiar field of the novel.

— Saul Bellow, from "The Sharp Edge of Life"

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Syria, revisited

A few years ago I visited Syria. Here's an excerpt from my old blog:

14 Oct 2009

With William Dalrymple's From the Holy Mountain as my on-again, off-again guide, I've spent the past couple of weeks seeking out the points of intersection between Islam and Christianity in Turkey and Syria. While southern Anatolia bore few obvious traces of its rich and complicated religious history, Syria was a revelation. Especially Aleppo, with its still-thriving Armenian, Maronite, and Greek Orthodox communities, and the Dead Cities, with their splendid Byzantine churches. So, too, was the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus. Like the Aya Sofia, another magnificent house of worship from late antiquity, the mosque doubled, for a time, as a site of worship for both Christians and Muslims. Pictured above is a scene from inside.

During my travels I managed to record a few calls to prayer:

Ankara, Turkey (3:30). Broadcast over the p.a. system at the central bus station. The noise and neuroses of travellers hurrying onto buses probably explains its urgency. Very few people obliged.

Antakya, Turkey (3:08). I awoke to this on a black September morning. Dig the reverb. Haunting, lovely, maybe a little over-the-top.

Aleppo, Syria (1:45). The midday call to prayer from the Umayyad Mosque in the Old City. Very stern.

Aleppo, Syria (4:40). An Armenian marching band thrown in for good measure. We stayed in the Christian Quarter near the Aleppo's main Armenian Orthodox Cathedral. The band practiced their instruments by torchlight, jostling against the walls of the smoking alleyway as they passed beneath our window.

I struggle to reconcile the Aleppo I can still see in my head (and hear, in those last two recordings) with the battleground depicted in the brave work of photographers like Jérôme Sessini. The losses are staggering — not just of the city's much-lamented medieval souks and mosques, but of its beautiful and complicated cosmopolitanism. 

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A Dead Boy

While on assignment in Burma, I attended the memorial service of a young rebel soldier killed in a landmine accident. Here's an excerpt from the story:

The boy died on Tuesday. Inexperience, the pastor said. That’s what killed him. The road dipped suddenly and we jumped in our seats. He smoothed the leather bible that rested primly on his knees. Today was Sunday, and he’d been tasked with the young rebel’s memorial service. Outside, smoke gathered over the morning fields. April is the burning season in northern Burma, when, ahead of the rains, Kachin farmers torch the forests to prepare the flinty mountain soil for planting. This time around the fighting had driven thousands from their land before they could finish the job. They fled to the camps along the Chinese border. Depending on how you looked at it, you could say that the boy was one of the soldiers who died trying to protect them.

You can read the whole thing over at Hazlitt.

(Photo: Diana Markosian)

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Outside, within

[T]he better part of our memories exist outside us, in a blatter of rain, in the smell of an unaired room, or of the first crackling brushwood fire in a cold grate: wherever, in short, we happen upon what our mind, having no use for it, had rejected, the last treasure that the past has in store, the richest, that which, when all our flow of tears seems to have dried at the source, can make us weep again. Outside us? Within us, rather, but hidden from our eyes in an oblivion more or less prolonged. It is thanks to this oblivion alone that we can from time to time recover the person that we were, place ourselves in relation to things as he was placed, suffer anew because we are no longer ourselves but he, because he loved what now leaves us indifferent. 

— Marcel Proust, from In a Budding Grove