departures (9)

What gives value to travel is fear. It is the fact that, at a certain moment, when we are so far from our own country . . . we are seized by a vague fear, and an instinctive desire to go back to the protection of old habits. This is the most obvious benefit of travel. At that moment we are feverish but also porous, so that the slightest touch makes us quiver to the depths of our being. . . . This is why we should not say that we travel for pleasure. There is no pleasure in travel, and I look upon it more as an occasion for spiritual testing. . . . Pleasure takes us away from ourselves in the same way that distraction, as in Pascal's use of the word, takes us away from God. Travel, which is like a greater and graver science, brings us back to ourselves.

—Albert Camus, from Notebooks 1935-1942.

*       *       *

But in the broadest sense, as a passage across significant borders -- a transformation, a transition -- travel is also a way of restoring the fabric of existence that has been torn by intrigue, heartlessness, contempt.

A way of recovering trust and kindness, because when alone among strangers you have no alternative but to be trustful and kind; you put yourself in their hands to feel less alone. 

And once the torn fabric is quietly and slowly restored, the beauty arising therein becomes all the more precious.

You are back to yourself.

the house

in that house from afar where she was habitually happy and well imagined, vague hours of a great sadness were formed; the days piled up in a great hierarchy to overcome. . . .

--Maria Gabriela Llansol, Na Casa de Julho e Agosto / In the House of July and August (Lisbon: Relogio D'Agua, 2003), p. 20. Translated from the Portuguese by DK.

It alone counteracted my wanderlust for two years -- its faded beauty, our complicity, the almost mediterranean light in the late afternoon.

The homespun, tucked away Tokyo.

The greatest heartbreak to leave it to such an uncertain fate, bereft of memories, the things once held dear.

However illusory it might all have been.

between worlds, again

How difficult it is to remain just one person. Our home is open, there are no keys in the doors, visible ghosts come in and out at will.

--Czeslaw Milosz

Therefore it is said: And the deeper secret within the secret: the land that is nowhere, that is the true home.

--The Secret of the Golden Flower

I may not always have looked at things in this way, but the more I travel from land to land, the more I get to know others and myself (and the others in me) -- the more I envisage it thus: no keys in the doors, fewer possessions, fewer certainties, fewer irreversibilities, but always moved by the undying, ever-growing desire to observe and understand, however intolerable, however impossible.

Never comfortable anywhere, but finally beginning to begin to understand in the flesh that home is indeed a profoundly uncomfortable place to be.

departures (7)

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

    --T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men.

I only wish departure did too: with a bang, with a clash, with a thud, whatever. With a clear beginning and a definite end.

It doesn't. It begins much earlier than you'd like to think and its pain never ends (even when you think it has).

Life seen from the perspective of death indeed; time put in parenthesis, coming from nowhere, going nowhere, disconnected from an-other's time.

So remote -- and yet you too enduring this never-ending, unbearable now. 

*       *       *

Pain breaks down the path of time I am extending; I fall back from the future I was pursuing and the past whose resources I was drawing on, to sink into a time of enduring. In the pain I have a foreboding of the time of dying. The other suffers in another interval without equivalent and in a pain in which I can nowise displace him. Pain blisters in intervals of time coming from nowhere, going nowhere, disconnected from the past and future of life, of the transpersonal enterprises, of the evolution of the planet.

Yet it is out of that other time, the time of his or her dying, that the other addresses me.

--Alphonso Lingis, Abuses (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 235.

strange portents

Marx once noted it—that in periods of transition, between the end of one hegemony and the beginning of another, strange and yet unnamed phenomena stalk the land.

They are both harbingers of what might come and uncanny throwbacks to bygone events.

Unfathomable.

But there is something in the air outside, most definitely, making it unfit to breathe.

departures (6)

We are floating in a medium of vast extent, always drifting uncertainly, blown to and fro; whenever we think we have a fixed point to which we can cling and make fast, it shifts and leaves us behind. . . . Nothing stands still for us. This is our natural state and yet the state most contrary to our inclinations.

--Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (Baltimore: Penguin, 1968), p. 92.

departures (5)

Nothing saps my vital energy and drains my joie de vivre more than people's inability to break the chains that bind them, to take risks, to reinvent themselves.

Emotional paralysis, self-delusion.

Hence the question returns ever so often: how to avoid yielding to terminal disenchantment and anguish when the malaise seems so insidious and all-pervading?

Yet there are times when you cannot but yield to weariness and sorrow -- and retreat from the world.

Because you have been skinned alive, left in raw flesh.

A temporary retreat, though. As when you sit in the dark, listening, listening, and one day something out there calls for you. It is the faintest of sounds, but you can perceive it only because you have inhabited silence for so long, been to the other shore of language, of life.


Illuminated by the shadow of the abyss that constricts your heart.

*       *       *

In fatigue one senses the fields of the world no longer supporting one's position, no longer sustaining one's movement and one's enterprises. In boredom the planes of the landscape lose their significance, the force of their presence; the paths become equivalent, lose their urgencies. One feels the emptiness that is in each thing, the abyss over which the paths scurry. Fatigue and boredom give way to apprehensiveness. In the emptiness of days, in insomniac nights, anxiety clenches the heart.


In this finding oneself adrift, supported by nothing, nothing to hold onto, one's life that still exists cleaves to itself. One comes to feel the heat and the pulse of one's potential for existence. One senses in oneself powers to feel things no one has yet felt, to perceive corners of the landscape hidden from others, to form thoughts no one has ever thought and fashion things no else can make, to pour one's kisses and caresses on minute and on grand things and on bodies no one has ever loved. The shadow of death that closes in illuminates these powers within oneself with its black light. One knows there are things out there that call for these powers.


Then, under the general and recurrent patterns of the common world, one catches sight of visions offered to one's own eyes alone, appeals made to one's own heart alone, tasks no one else sees, faces turned to one's caresses and surfaces turned to one's laughter and tears. They summon one, with an urgency that is illuminated by the shadow of the abyss that constricts one's heart. One will advance unto them, releasing one's forces for them. 


--Alphonso Lingis, Abuses (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 232.

departures (3)

I am the most tired woman in the world. I am tired when I get up. Life requires an effort which I cannot make. Please give me that heavy book. I need to put something heavy like that on top of my head. I have to place my feet under the pillows always, so as to be able to stay on earth. Otherwise I feel myself going away, going away at a tremendous speed, on account of my lightness. I know that I am dead. As soon as I utter a phrase my sincerity dies, becomes a lie whose coldness chills me.

Don't say anything, because I see that you understand me, and I am afraid of your understanding. I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one! I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe. I am in great terror of your understanding by which you penetrate into my world; and then I stand revealed and I have to share my kingdom with you.

But Jeanne, fear of madness, only the fear of madness will drive us out of the precincts of our solitude, out of the sacredness of our solitude. The fear of madness will burn down the walls of our secret house and send us out into the world seeking warm contact. Worlds self−made and self−nourished are so full of ghosts and monsters.

--Anais Nin, House of Incest.

*       *       *

Narcissism -- its seductions and pitfalls.

To be unable to love or take any genuine interest in anyone that is not a mirror image of oneself. The utter denial of otherness, difference, patience, tolerance, generosity, distance from oneself.

The first intimation of madness. 

And here too departure offers a forked path: whether you take yourself with you on the journey and remain the same, your self-hatred and self-destructive willfulness accompanying you like the shadow of death (a pointless journey nowhere); or you get rid of yourself to find yourself.

Rimbaud: Car je est un autre...

This is to say that you give up finding 'home' to observe home from a distance.

No purge, no escapism. Just going away to think, to feel alive.

Shatter the mirror, break the rotten 和 (wa)!

And only then may something astonishing happen, who knows.

departures (2)

You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.

         --Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable.



Yes, a departure can be a recapitulation of personal and cultural history, and dissipate disgust with the all-familiar, as Eric J. Leed puts it in his superb The Mind of the Traveler.

Yet each departure is also the eternal reenactment of a deep injury: the loss of home, an imaginary home, away from which no one knows you, no one recognises you, no one confirms your being in their gaze.

Because their gaze is always set beyond you.

You are invisible, banished from the others' gaze. The original meaning of 'exile', precisely: a banished person.

Thus an exile proceeds from invisibility to invisibility. Once an exile, always an exile.

Unrecognised, you are always no longer 'there' -- you belong only in the place you long for.

And where is that? Where is the land of those who have fallen from the time and the gaze of others?

Alphonso Lingis calls it 'the community of those who have nothing in common'. Nothing in common except their fallenness, their vulnerability, their mortality. The cracked people.

And it is the necessary alienation of departure that brings you to them, that compels you to communicate, to establish some form of communion, even if at the risk of causing misunderstanding, fear of disclosure.

Blunders happen.

Because they are in pain, we are in pain. And pain isolates, sets adrift.

But recognition can happen, when you see the abyss beneath the mask, the half-hidden wounds in the flesh.


The night of his eyes.

*       *       *

To see the sensibility, susceptibility, vulnerability of another is to see not the inner diagrams but the substance of the body. It is to see the opaque skin, lassitude and torpor, into which the expressions form and vanish. It is to see the night of eyes, on which the forms of the world leave no trace. It is to see the spasms of pain that agitate the substance of the flesh, the tremblings of pleasure that die away. It is to see wrinkles and wounds.
In pain the other sinks back into his or her body, into prostration that already delivers him or her to the death in the world. The flesh in pain is anything but an object; sensibility, subjectivity fill it, with a terrible evidence. This evidence is turned imperatively to me, more pressing than the evolution of the planet and the anonymous enterprises in the humanized map laid out on it, more urgent than the tasks my own death has addressed to me. It is not in elaborating a common language and reason, in collaborating in transpersonal enterprises, that the human community takes form. It is in going to rejoin those who, fallen from the time of personal and collective history, have to go on when nothing is possible or promised.


--Alphonso Lingis, Abuses (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 235-36.

the marvels and mysteries of Japanese 'kokusaika' (2)

19th century, 20th century, 21st century -- and the very same attitudes persist.

As the song goes, 'after changes upon changes, [they] are more or less the same'...

*       *       *

The transformations which are being accomplished are under the direction of foreigners in Government service, and of Japanese selected for their capacities, who have studied for some years in Europe and America; and the Government has spared neither trouble nor expense in securing the most competent assistance in all departments, and it is only in comparatively few instances that it has been badly advised by interested by interested aliens for the furtherance of personal or other ends. About 500 foreigners have been at one time or other in its service, and though they have met with annoyances and exasperations, the terms of their contracts have been faithfully adhered to. Some of these gentlemen are decorated with high-sounding titles during their brief engagements; but it must be remembered that they are there as helpers only, without actual authority, as servants and not masters, and that, with a notable exception, the greater their energy, ability, and capacity for training, the sooner are their services dispensed with, and one department after another passes from foreign into native management. The retention of foreign employes forms no part of the programme of progress. "Japan for the Japanese" is the motto of Japanese patriotism; the "Barbarians" are to be used, and dispensed with as soon as possible.

--Isabella Bird, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan: An Account of Travels in the Interior, Including Visits to the Aborigines of Yezo and the Shrines of Nikko and Ise, vol. I (1880; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 10. [emphasis mine]

How little Japanese attitudes toward foreign academics have changed over the past hundred years is suggested by the experience of one of the most illustrious of the early kyoshi, the Leipzig-trained physician Erwin Baelz, who served from 1876 to 1902 as chief adviser in developing the medical school and hospital at Tokyo University. Dr. Baelz's diary reveals a gradual devolution from his admiration in the 1870s for Japan's eagerness for Western knowledge, to his indignation in the 1880s as he watched growing numbers of foreign colleagues dismissed and repatriated without any thanks for their contributions, to his own frustration in the 1890s as he found himself bypassed in major faculty decisions and sought to leave but was repeatedly held back by unfulfilled promises to improve his situation.

At his own twenty-fifth anniversary festivities, Baelz touched on what he saw as the root of Japan's shabby treatment of foreign scholars. The Japanese, Baelz suggested, often seemed not to understand the true source and nature of Western science, mistaking it for a sort of machine that could be easily carted off to new places and made to perform the same work, rather than seeing it as an organism requiring a carefully nurturing atmosphere. Foreign scholars from many countries had worked hard to implant the spirit of modern science in Japan, but although they had come to nurture the tree itself, their mission had largely been misunderstood. The Japanese had treated them as no more than peddlers of the final fruits, and had been content to take the latest plums from them, without seeking to appropriate the spirit that had nourished the tree. Baelz concluded:

Soon there will be very few foreign teachers left in the country. Let me advise you to give those that still remain more freedom than you have done in the past, more opportunity for independent work; and let me urge you to keep in close touch with them in fields besides that of their strictly educational work . . . . In that way you will learn more of the spirit of science, the spirit with which you cannot become intimately acquainted in lecture theaters . . . but only in daily association with those engaged in research.

--Ivan P. Hall, Cartels of the Mind: Japan's Intellectual Closed Shop (New York: Norton, 1998), pp. 121-22. [emphases mine]

the marvels and mysteries of Japanese 'kokusaika' (1)

I have been re-reading a couple of books on Japan in the context of one of my current research projects – including Ivan P. Hall’s razor-sharp Cartels of the Mind: Japan's Intellectual Closed Shop.

While I generally agree, on the basis of my own experience in Japanese academia, with the line of his argument, there are certain passages which resonate more deeply with me, perhaps because I was raised in a Christian culture where a sense of humanist universalism and solidarity with the plight of others are (were?) still widely upheld moral values.

And perhaps that is why too the conspicuous absence of these values from Japanese society makes it so difficult, if not virtually impossible, for people with ‘our’ cultural roots to suppress a sense of outrage at the appalling discrepancies, aberrations, inequalities and injustices that such absence constantly breeds.

This also makes the Japanese shoddy attempts at 国際化 (internationalization) sound utterly ludicrous and insincere. Most of them seem absolutely incapable of understanding the reciprocity and openness to others that a genuine cosmopolitanism demands.

And how on earth can one take such people seriously and show any goodwill towards them?

Ivan P. Hall, spot on:

The truth of the matter is that the Japanese do not want non-Japanese physically present among them for any length of time, embedded as individuals in the working institutions of their society. As short-term feted guests or curiosities, yes; but not as fixed human furniture. Permanent intrusions are viewed by the Japanese as intolerable threats to their value system, their social relations, their way of life. . . .

What has been missing from Japan’s historical conceptualization of itself in respect to both the West and Asia is a capacity to think in terms of “horizontal” relationships among equals – a greater sensitivity to universal human traits and needs and interests, overriding the rigid verticalities of superior-inferior power relationships and the precipitous intercultural chasms that still dominate the Japanese view of the outside world. Having climbed to the top of the pile [my comment: it now seems to be slipping down towards the bottom, though!], Japan has difficulty deciding where to go next, since it cannot imagine simply going sideways – toward a relaxed collegiality.

In short, what prevents Japan’s assumption of an enlightened world leadership role is, more than anything else, its overblown particularism. Great powers in human history have all predicated their mandate (however presumptuous or self-serving) on some sort of universalism. That goes for the great imperial purveyors of political pax – be it America, Britain, ancient Rome, or even the perverted communist universalism of the old Soviet bloc – as well as for the major cultural players like France, with its self-appointed mission civilisatrice, and the Chinese with their superb self-confidence over the ages that the barbarians at the gates would eventually succumb to the overpowering charm of Chinese culture.

Indeed, one of the most striking features of contemporary, hitech Japan is the persistent Japanese fear of the adoption of their own culture by others, an attitude that contrasts most starkly with that of the French. A foreigner in France who does not know the language, or handles it poorly, has traditionally been persona non grata – precisely the reverse of Japan, where the fluent foreigner seems threatening and intrusive, and the complete linguistic and cultural ingénue is welcomed with open arms and sighs of relief. In France a reasonable mastery of the French language and culture by a resident foreign artist, scholar or journalist usually leads to professional and personal treatment no worse than that which Frenchmen accord one another. In Japan anxiety over the acculturation of others to their culture – together with the conviction that it cannot be done – leads most Japanese to view the effort less as a compliment or first step toward bonding than as an unwanted prying into their national psyche.

Unfortunately, the evidence to date suggests the difficulty of convincing the Japanese that their great influence in the world today makes reciprocal access to their society all but mandatory. Most, instead, when pressed, will elevate their exclusionism to a cultural principle requiring tolerance and acceptance by others on the basis of cultural relativism. True respect, in other words, means Japanese respect for American openness, and American respect for Japanese exclusivity. The demands for intellectual access represent Western absolutes, a new form of cultural imperialism. Heads I win, tails you lose. The economical and political implications of this insular rubric are mind-boggling, but that is the bottom line of Japan’s pledges of “internationalization.” (pp. 178-79; added emphases mine)

An intellectual -- and cultural -- closed shop, no doubt.

Bless 'em all

My friends are much more dangerous than my enemies. These latter—with infinite subtlety—spin webs to keep me out of places where I hate to go,—and tell stories of me to people whom it would be vanity and vexation to meet; and they help me so much by their unconscious aid that I almost love them. They help me to maintain the isolation indispensable to quiet regularity of work. . . . Blessed be my enemies, and forever honored all those that hate me !

--Lafcadio Hearn, Letter to Ernest Fenollosa, December 1898, cited in The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn, ed. Elizabeth Bisland (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923), vol. 3, p. 147.


And how could I possibly disagree -- there's no more productive place on earth to make enemies indeed.

the erosion of character

The important sense of character. Until recently people had character, and you felt that very strongly. . . . Their word is a commitment and a pledge, that you don't just drop when it becomes advantageous to yourself to do so. When they pledge their word they keep it. So I began to think that when people have nothing to identify themselves with they have character. This is a way poor people have a noble character. . . . A kind of inner strength, integrity. . . . There is a sense of character in people who have no other way in which to construct an identity. It seems to me now in our consumer culture we construct our identity with things. We construct our identity with collections, with garb, you know with little things we have in our home, our jazz collection or collection of cars or whatever.

--Alphonso Lingis, 'Foreign Bodies: Interview with Alphonso Lingis' (1996) in Encounters with Alphonso Lingis, eds. Alexander E. Hooke and Wolfgang W. Fuchs (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington, 2003), pp. 94-95.

*       *       *

I  have been thinking about this at length ever since I set my feet here, in the attempt to make sense of spineless, mindless behaviours whose recurrence and pervasiveness puzzle and, increasingly, depress me. And the more I get to know, in the skin and the bone, the workings of this society, the more I become convinced that there must be something in it that is set up to systematically nip in the bud any manifestation of character or integrity.

The education -- or perhaps I should say indoctrination -- system may partly account for the phenomenon, but it does not explain everything, since foreigners who have never been exposed to it all too often develop the very same two-facedness once they acquire a stake in Japan and become intent on surviving here, at whatever cost. A cynical adaptation strategy, no doubt.

A friend who was born here but spent many years abroad once told me that this insidious spiritlessness among so many younger generations (that is, those who did not experience the War and its hardships, having grown up in an affluent Japan) may be due to the fact that acquisitiveness and mass consumerism have taken the place of once time-honoured spiritual and personal values, leaving nothing but an appalling emptiness in their wake.

While I tend to be wary of over-simplifying and nostalgic explanations, there is indeed something -- a complex array of factors -- that is eroding this society at its very core and making any meaningful, trustworthy human relationships simply impossible here.

Unbreathable.

Japan is certainly not alone in this disturbing tendency, but is well ahead of most other societies in this respect. They will catch up, for sure, but where will Japan and the Japanese be then...?



NOTE (23:30): After reading the text above, a Japanese friend, one of those rare souls who has the capacity to look at his own culture with a critical eye and who doesn't take criticism personally, warns me that I need to be careful about my moral assumptions. That is to say, I cannot take for granted concepts such as character or integrity, because, he tells me, they simply do not exist, or at least have wholly distinct connotations, in a culture that does not value (and actually represses and frowns upon) 個性, individuality, the very core of Western moral philosophy (or, as Donald Richie once put it, 'Western man's pride and pain'). Even words such as 人格 (personality) and 尊厳 (dignity) are fairly recent in Japanese vocabulary, or so it seems.

And here we go again: how is it possible to find any common ground and establish long-lasting, satisfactory friendships here when what 'we', stuffy old Westerners, consider essential, integral (and therefore non-negotiable) parts of the concept of friendship -- character, trust, candour, constancy, generosity, loyalty e.g. -- just do not seem to exist in this culture?

.

the erotics of trust (4)

To find beauty, love, joy, and reasons to care for and trust others in the most improbable places and times, in the most difficult circumstances, amidst the squalor, on the move, among people who have nothing in common -- is there a more meaningful, true-to-life basis on which to erect a whole philosophy?

And to be sensible enough not to take oneself too seriously, and to be able to laugh at life's endless absurdities, at the frailty of one's body and desires.

*       *       *

How foolish two people get when they become lovers -- how infantile their speech, how naive their sentiments, how frivolous their behavior! How awkward, how ridiculous are the gropings and thrashings of people copulating, how empty the aimless repetitions of caresses, how mindless the compulsive buildup toward orgasm! We lock the door, pull the drapes. In sex theaters, all the movements are coreographed to be graceful and synchronized; nothing is left to the directness of lustful urges. When in the force of momentary grabbings and repulsions they do show through, we are repelled and embarrassed: suddenly we see what we do in our lovemaking. We free ourselves from our embarrassment by giggling, and outside the theater guffawing over what we saw.

But when we spy on others and cannot help laughing, this laughter spreads through our body and reverberates in dissolute and wanton impulses. Telling and hearing dirty jokes do not make us superior and aloof from lustful urges; they make us sink into our sensual nature. In laughter we are transparent to one another, the peals of laughter not expressions of an I or of a you, spreading like waves about a pebble dropped into a lake, with no more individuality than waves.

The lust that disconnects the body from its tasks and its seriousness and releases it on the languorous and agitated body of another is nothing but the laughter of that body. The throbs, the convulsive repetitions, the upheaval, the absurd pleasure of the bodies in lascivious excitement are the laughter not apart from, but in those bodies. They have locked the door and pulled the drapes so that their laughter may be uninhibited, one and undivided. Orgasm is the vortex of the generalized laughter of the bodies.


--Alphonso Lingis, 'Love Junkies' in Trust (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), pp. 119-20.

home and away

Once you are compelled, for personal or professional reasons, to spend the rest of your life abroad, from place to place, land to land, you cannot help wondering. How many people are there who make you feel at home in the absence of any semblance of home?

So very few, especially here, especially now, when time-honoured forms of communicating with the other and creating community have been replaced by standardised, shallow forms of self-fashioning and ego gyms for narcissists.


Sic transit gloria mundi...

*       *       *

The home base is a pole of repose and departure. The zone of the intimate is a pole of warmth and tranquility that we keep sight of as we advance into the stretches of the alien and that our nomadic wanderings gravitate back to.

--Alphonso Lingis, 'The Intimate and the Alien' in The Imperative.

But in most cases, we have to appeal to others to make ourselves at home. We appeal to the others to help us be at home in the desert, in the rain forest, in the tropics, in the tundra, and in the ocean. And in childhood, and in the strange nocturnal regions of the erotic, and in the shadow of death that advances.

--Alphonso Lingis, 'The Elemental that Faces' in The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common.

the erotics of trust (3)

Hate can be cold, ingenious, devious. Love is lawless, volatile, and violent. The adoration that breaks out of us violates our integrity and breaks up our individuality. To be smitten by love is not to be simply wounded, but shattered.

In heading off to the back alleys and wastelands where our heads are exposed to the blows of chance we know in exhilaration what we have received by chance, what we are by chance. Love is abruptly ignited in impasses and traps; it is the combustion of interpenetrating dreams of bodies collapsed and dysfunctional. It is the incandescence of luck in the most squalid, the most sordid circumstances, the worst luck.

Shit happens.

Love attaches to the abyss. It is hate that circumscribes its own identity. Tell me whom you hate and I will tell you who you are. Tell me whom you love and I will know as little about you as before.


--Alphonso Lingis, 'Love Junkies' in Trust (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), pp. 109-24.

life is elsewhere

After an exhausting day putting up with too many of these atrophied creatures who seem afraid of their own shadow, and culminating in a surreal train ride among zombified salarymen clinging to their briefcases as if to a crucifix, one badly needs to come to one's senses and feel alive and free and responsive.


These guys are dead, most definitely -- and somebody has forgotten to bury them.

*       *       *

We are forces on the move, we are free, because we shed the images of ourselves as we go, and do not whip around to gather them up. We are active because we release our fevers and our fervors into the things we pass. We are strong because we discharge our forces into things that roll and rise. We laugh because we release our light and our warmth gratuitously, without asking in return, feeling happiest, as the sun does when it pours the excesses of its gold upon the seas. We are free because we are not imprisoned in our form or in our forces.

--Alphonso Lingis, Wonders seen in Forsaken Places (Chester Perkowski, 2010), p. 132.

a letter in a bottle

Sad indeed how, in their self-absorption and masks, people here seem so pitifully blind to its signs, to its precarious conditions of possibility.

To the intimate bonds of trust, to the promise and risk of close friendship.

To the last remains of our humanity.

A letter put in a bottle and cast into the sea; or an extended hand, half waving, half drowning -- so endangered and fragile has it become.


And thus all the more precious.

*       *       *

It has long seemed to me that a friendship where one does not teach one another becomes shallow and meaningless. Everyone who, while wandering along the shore of whatever continent or island, has found a letter put in a bottle and cast into the sea, has found a friend.

--Alphonso Lingis, Abuses (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. viii.

being alive

Some people, some things are still worth waiting for, though - and for this particular one I waited over a year. An immense joy to find it inside my mailbox yesterday. I shall immerse myself in it as soon as I finish some pressing tasks on my desk.

I've been reading each and every work by Tim Ingold and never cease to be amazed at how he gets better and better every time.

And how can you not feel energised by someone who proposes such an exhilarating and, at the same time, sensible, down-to-earth approach to scholarship?

Why do we acknowledge only our textual sources but not the ground we walk, the ever-changing skies, mountains and rivers, rocks and trees, the houses we inhabit and the tools we use, not to mention the innumerable companions, both non-human animals and fellow humans, with which and with whom we share our lives? They are constantly inspiring us, challenging us, telling us things. If our aim is to read the world, as I believe it ought to be, then the purpose of written texts should be to enrich our reading so that we might be better advised by, and responsive to, what the world is telling us. I would like to think that this book serves such a purpose.

--Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (Oxford: Routledge, 2011), p. xii.

More, much more on this soon...

in transit

Historically, the discourse of absence is carried on by the Woman: Woman is sedentary, Man hunts, journeys; Woman is faithful (she waits), man is fickle (he sails away, he cruises). It is Woman who gives shape to absence, elaborates its fiction, for she has time to do so; she weaves and she sings; the Spinning Songs express both immobility (by the hum of the Wheel) and absence (far away, rhythms of travel, sea surges, cavalcades). It follows that in any man who utters the other's absence something feminine is declared: this man who waits and who suffers from his waiting is miraculously feminized.
--Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), pp. 13-14.

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And does it follow, I wonder, that the woman who does not patiently wait nor weaves nor sings, Penelope-like, but journeys and sails away is disgracefully masculinised?

Or does this woman cross into some liminal space where she remains forever untouchable, unrecognisable, neither home nor away, unloving beloved, loving unbeloved?

Forever in transit. Intransitive.