Below is a video of me reading a speech written by my student, Andrea.
The title for the speech is "The World That I Dream Of." She wrote the speech entirely. I made some substantial corrections to grammar and a few tweaks to vocabulary choices, but I added not a single sentence or idea, nor were her her original grammar or word choices anywhere so poor that I was unable to grasp her intended meaning (conceding that I have many years of familiarity with what you might call Korean rhetorical norms being awkwardly translated into English via a cellphone dictionary, where every sentence starts with "Then," "So," or "And").
I handed her my camera and I am reading her speech for her because she is going to be entering a speaking contest, and she struggles some with English intonation. I thought that by giving her an example of a native speaker's intonation on her words, she could practice and improve her own.
As I read the speech, I became aware that it's really a pretty remarkable bit of rhetoric, for a 6th grader. I wasn't close to producing this level of social thought at that age, much less in a foreign language. I think Andrea has a future as some kind of preacher or inspirational speaker (e.g. a TED-talker).
Someone tried to develop a (pseudo-)scientific unit for the measurement of absurdity, or the degree of surrealism in a given situation.
In and of itself, it has a certain absurdity to it. It began, apparently, on reddit (a website dedicated to absurdity, under some analyses), but now a separate "wiki" is being built to expound the notion: cuil theory.
Moving forward, let's assume you have read some of the materials on that linked website. Then consider that the idea of cuil theory, in itself, has a cuil value greater than one.
I think cuil would be useful for classifying the content of dreams, not to meantion academic work in comparative literature, or philosophy? How about Žižek? I had intended to write more about this, but what I wrote before seemed absurd (go figure) so I deleted it, and now I'm not doing well at recapturing the tone of my original conception.
The one observation that struck me when I first ran across it: the reason why Cervantes' last work, Persiles, stands at least equal to – if not superior to – the Quijote novels, is because the Persiles has a higher cuil number. Elaborate….
The blogger formerly known as IOZ, who has resurrected himself at some point in the last year as Blogarach, is one of my favorite bloggers – not just because I am sympathetic to his unapologetic marxism (if I can't always agree), but because he is a brilliant stylist, as I've observed before.
In a recent blog entry, he discusses the possibility of a post-scarcity society, and concludes our current problems with poverty and inequality are ultimately little more than a "supply chain problem." This both understates and oversimplifies the problem, and yet I think he is fundamentally correct.
He quotes Buckminster Fuller, who made post-scarcity arguments way back in the 70's. Here is the quote – I think it's interesting, as does the blogarach, in part because of how long ago the argument was made.
We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.
But the most intriguing thing about his essay is the title: "The Culture."
That title is the only reference, except in the tags at the foot of the blog entry, to the recently deceased author Iain M. Banks' stunningly fascinating and deeply-wrought science fiction concept of post-scarcity in his "Culture" novels, launched in 1987's Consider Phlebas. I like that kind of subtlety. Anyway, my recommendation is: read Blogarach's blog entry; read Buckminster Fuller; read Banks' novels. That is the path to understanding my core optimism for humanity's long-term future.
Even if I sometimes end up foregoing that same style of optimism vis-a-vis the narrower futures that pertain to my own existence.
There are two main systems for deriving citizenship, which, being essentially legal concepts, go under their Latin names: ius sanguinis and ius solis. The idea of ius sanguinis, or “right of blood,” is that citizenship derives primarily from the bloodline. This is the traditional way of determining citizenship in countries that are primarily monocultural, as the nations of Europe were in the early modern era. Modern Asian countries also mostly use this model. The alternative is ius solis, or “right of soil,” where citizenship is derived from where one is born. I’m not sure that any modern country has a strictly ius solis model, but most modern “Western” countries – especially immigration-driven countries like the US, Canada or Argentina for example – use a combination of ius solis and ius sanguinis to decide citizenship.
I have thought about the issues around these definitions a lot, first of all as someone who was something of an immigration reform activist in the US prior to my own somewhat unintended emmigration (I say unintended in that I never meant for my emmigration to be permanent or even so long-term, but it has definitely evolved that way), but also as someone who is intrigued by the slow, difficult path Korean society and government is navigating toward a more open attitude toward immigration.
I have been observing with some degree of fascination my recent coworker Razel, who is Philippine-Korean. She acquired her status via marriage, but the extent to which she is integrated into Korean culture and society is breathtaking, and although I have no doubt that she occasionally experiences racism and prejudice, she says it’s in no way the defining feature of her experience. I feel jealousy for her level of Korean Language speaking ability – listening to her on the phone talking to her friends, code-switching between English, Korean, Tagalog and Visayan (the latter being her “native” Philippine languages) leaves me in quiet admiration.
Korean culture is uncomfortable with the idea of immigration. They welcome ethnic Korean “returnees,” called 교포 [gyopo], because they can be more confident of their ability to integrate into Korean society, and they more-or-less accept the idea of mixed marriages as an inevitability, too – as in the example of my coworker. But Koreans resist the idea of foreign individuals or families arriving and simply becoming Korean. It doesn’t sit well with their traditional Confucian concept of the predominance of ancestry and their ius sanguinis model of citizenship.
The other day, however, I had a weird brainstorm as I was thinking about my coworker’s mostly successful integration into Korean society. What if we could define a new, third model of citizenship? Specifically, for a more culturally and linguistically homogeneous society such as Korea, we could grant citizenship rights based, essentially, on the ability to participate in the culture – which is to say, the capacity for the language. It wouldn’t be that hard to say something to the effect of “citizenship for those who pass the language test” – though this would require an ethical and corruption-free administration of a well-designed test, which I’m not sure is the current status of Korea’s de facto standard Korean Language test, the TOPIK. But it would be a workable goal. So that would be ius linguae, “right of language.”
One thought that springs to mind is that this is a model that many in the US would be pleased to adopt – force all those “damn immigrants” to learn English before they get a green card or citizenship! Yet even as I’m happy to propose ius linguae for Korea, I recoil at the idea of applying it in the US. What is the difference? Mostly, history. Korea is historically essentially a single language / culture / state – for hundreds at least if not thousands of years. The US, on the other hand, was almost from the beginning a state defined by some concept of essentially “right of arrival” – to recall one of my favorite quotes on immigration, from Herman Melville, “If they can get here, they have God’s right to come.”
There are tensions within this, but that is the essence. Further, the US project is complicated by the preexistence of linguistic minorities – both Native American and French, Spanish, etc. – groups of people who were in place when the US essentially appeared “over” them through war or annexation. The US is an empire, not a unitary state. It hardly seems fair to impose as a requirement for citizenship the imperial language, since to do so guarantees the possibility of stateless permanent residents within your country, similar to the horrific legal status of Koreans living in Japan even today, 70 years after the end of the War. That Japanese example is a perfect one: the inevitable consquence of applying a ius sanguinis citizenship model in the context of empire is inequality and injustice.
I think Korea, however, is sufficiently compact and homogeneous that applying this type of ius linguae model of citizenship might represent an excellent compromise path between the traditional and inevitably racist ius sanguinis and the more modern ius solis / sanguinis hybrids, the latter of which would lead to an increasintly multi-cultural society and the emergence of linguistic / cultural ghettos – Korea already is beginning to have these in places where there are large numbers of foreigners, such as the area I call “Russiatown” that I like to visit sometimes. Granting citizenship only to immigrants who have already shown a commitment to integrating into Korean culture via the acquisition of the language would be a great solution, maybe.
This is just a brainstorm – a first draft – that occured to me mostly while walking back and forth to work over several days. I’m sure it’s subject to plenty of criticisms and refinements, but I wanted to record my thoughts and put them down.
In other news: yesterday, I turned off the internet and my phone and did almost nothing. It was a lazy day but I think I needed it. I am in danger of social burnout given the teaching load I have taken on (willingly), so I’m going to nurse my off-time for maximum isolation, as my alone time is recuperative for me.
"Will is merely the drive to reduce dissonance between each of our active neural circuits." – An internet philosopher who goes by "Athene."
I'm really not sure what to make of this. At one level, it's pretty serious philosophy with strong grounding in the sciences. On the other hand, it seems gimicky in presentation, and I have some scepticism because of that. And what's with that voice? Something computer-generated, I think.
It's a few days late, but I just now ran across it.
Warning: if you are unfamiliar with Burroughs, be forewarned – you might want to reconsider listening to his "prayer" (which is not a musical track, either, by the way – this is poetry being read by the author).
Burroughs was a great American writer in my humble opinion – one of the greatest – but he was undeniably deeply profane and gallingly liberal (or perhaps more correctly he was a type of libertarian – he was pro-drug but also radically pro-gun, for example, and though he despised "lawmen" he didn't seem to have much of a problem with big government in principle).
His iconoclasm comes across plenty clearly in this short bit.
William S. Burroughs, "A Thanksgiving Prayer."
Text:
For John Dillinger, in hope he is still alive. Thanksgiving Day, November 28th, 1986.
Thanks for the wild turkey and the passenger pigeons, destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts. Thanks for a continent to despoil and poison. Thanks for Indians to provide a modicum of challenge and danger. Thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin leaving the carcasses to rot. Thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes. Thanks for the American dream, To vulgarize and to falsify until the bare lies shine through. Thanks for the KKK. For nigger-killin' lawmen, feelin' their notches. For decent church-goin' women, with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces.
Thanks for "Kill a Queer for Christ" stickers. Thanks for laboratory AIDS. Thanks for Prohibition and the war against drugs. Thanks for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business. Thanks for a nation of finks. Yes, thanks for all the memories – all right let's see your arms! You always were a headache and you always were a bore. Thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams.
Burroughs, as a writer, was perhaps one of the single most influential in my life, though you wouldn't know that by looking at my lifestyle or my other tastes and interests. I am the junkie-that-never-was.
My feelings of tweegret have overcome me, despite my long, strong efforts to resist it.
So I have become a twit – which is by far the best noun coined for those who tweet, using twitter.
But rather than give in to a phenomenon that seems so banal and narcissistic as to render even facebookland a veritable utopia of social altruism, I have decided to “double down.”
Here is my twitter manifesto, #sayitin14 – dedicated to minimalizing further the already minimalist tendencies in twitter:
I will only post tweets 14 characters in length or fewer. Note that this does not include links or hashtags.
Originally, I thought to make my rule a limit of posts to one word. But I decided that to better double down on the original 140 character limit, a 14 character limit was more elegant.
I would like to observe that in a unicoded, character-per-syllable language with essentially optional spacing between words, like Korean, 14 characters is still quite sufficient to post entire sentences.
English, with its relatively low information density (on a per character basis), is more limited, and the restriction will lead to a certain absurdism. I hope.
My username is @waejeorae (which is based on my joke “Korean Name” 왜저래 [waejeorae = what the…? , what’s up?] – because the pronunciation resembles that of my true name in Korean order: Way Jared). If you follow me, I promise to be disappointing.
As this late adoption of the now ubiquitous twitter platform shows, I am not really an “early adopter.” I certainly have been an early adopter in some realms: I wrote all my papers in high school on computer (1979~1983), I programmed my first spreadsheet app in 1986, I bought my first laptop PC in 1992, I published my first website (that people – namely, my students – actually visited) in 1995 (on geocities – remember that?), and this here blog thingy was started well ahead of the technology adoption curve in 2004. But I’ve been quite late in other areas: I only bought my first cell phone in 2004, and only got my first smartphone last year. And here I am joining twitter only past their IPO (which is a well-established signal of outright decline in the technology world). So whether I adopt some technology or not is largely connected with my perception of its usefulness, rather than some desire or interest in adopting new technologies for the sheer sake of being at the vanguard.
My current book-in-progress-in-which-I’m-actually-making-progress is an introductory book on Chinese philosophy by Fung Yu-Lan. I’ve never really tackled Chinese philosophy before – it’s a major lacuna in my philosophical education, which is more extensive in Western, Native American and Indian (i.e. South Asian) philosophical traditions. Obviously, an introduction to Chinese philosophy starts, more or less, with Confucius. The core principal is apparently called “jen” (via Wade-Giles, used by Fung). The book doesn’t provide characters, which I’m actually interested in knowing, so I did a little bit of research, to tie things together. I also tried to find out the Korean readings of the characters in question, as that interests me too. I will try to summarize pages 42-44 in Fung’s book in my own words: The key principal of all of Confucius’ thought is human-heartedness, or jen (仁, pinyin [ren], Korean 인 glossed as 어질다 [benevolent, virtuous] in a hanja dictionary). Jen is in turn divided into a “positive” and “negative” aspect, each of which is a sort of corollary of Westerndom’s “Golden Rule”: conscientiousness toward others or loyalty, chung (忠, pinyin [zhong], Korean 충 glossed as 충성 [loyalty]), which really means “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” and altruism or reciprocity, shu (恕, pinyin [shu]?, Korean 서 glossed as 용서 [pardon, mercy]), which really means “Don’t do unto others what you would not have them do unto you.” Then one of Confucius’ students, Tseng Tzu, summarizes: “Our master’s teaching consists of the principle of chung and shu, and that is all” (Analects, VII).
Never attribute to malice that which is more easily explained by stupidity.
The phrase applies a sort of Occam's Razor to the problem of bad behavior in people.
Recently, having run across several accounts of "racism" in Korea, I wondered if there might be a sort of corollary to this aphorism that applies specifically to those sorts of bad behavior. Of course, as foreigners in Korea, we often suffer strange or disturbing slights and mistreatments. One frequent thing that I have experienced myself is to be ignored by taxi drivers.
My thought, though, is that rather than assume that's racism at work, why not assume it's not that different from the reason store clerks say nothing to you, or why my students sit and stare at me when I say hello: it's fear or anxiety over fraught language interaction.
Obviously, there is still generalization and stereotyping going on – after all, it might be one of those foreigners who speaks Korean well that the taxi driver drove past.
But social language anxiety is very powerful. Consider my own bizarre telephone anxiety as a case-in-point. I am not that indrawn of a person, yet I am terrified to answer my phone in this country. Unless it's a number of someone I've already added to my contact list (and therefore their name shows when they call) I simply don't answer my phone, for fear of having to interact in Korean. This is true, despite the fact that I have in the past successfully interacted on the phone in Korean, when it was absolutely necessary.
Might it not be the case that many of these taxi drivers and store clerks who slight foreigners are simply engaging in similar language-anxiety driven behavior? I think so. Koreans are typically very self-conscious about their poor English skills, because their society has spent several generations, now, pounding into their heads that they should have such skills.
Well, anyway, I guess I could develop this further and more precisely, but mostly, I wanted to invent a new corollary to the aphorism at the start of this blog-post. It goes:
Never attribute to ideology (e.g. "racism") that which is more easily explained by social anxiety.
It really can be easily represented by one of those SAT-style vocabulary analogies:
Last night, I had a pretty long conversation with Curt. He was distraught over difficult business decisions: complaints from parents about teachers (fortunately not about me, at least none reported)… therefore more changes in the employee rolls forthcoming… lost students….
"I don't want to be 원장 [wonjang = hagwon boss] anymore!" he sighed.
He paid me an unexpected complement, then, as I complained, in turn, about my current struggle with reconciling my slow and still painful post-cancer recovery with my ambition, such as it is.
"In the time if have known you, you have shown a strong ability to be reborn," he said. He stood up and demonstratively tapped the [broken link! FIXME]Nietzsche quote that is still taped up beside the staffroom door. I'm often surprised and pleased by the philosophical turns our conversations take.
"I reinvent myself," I clarified, perhaps wanting to move away from the religious connotations of being "reborn" that he no doubt wasn't really familiar with in English.
"Yes. You were very different when I first met you." That was in late, 2007, and I worked for him the first time in the spring of 2008.
I didn't feel different…. I don't feel different.
But yes… I reinvent myself, it's true. Constantly.
"So now, I have to reinvent myself again," I finally said, with my own sigh.
"Yes. You can do it."
I will strive to become a better teacher, in my new post-cancer version of the jared.
Here are some ideas from my sixth-grade student Andrea in her recent month-end speech, on how to be a better teacher.
She's the kind of student that I am teaching for – I prefer students like her who have such high standards and expectations. I have titled her speech, "Teach Children with Love and Wisdom" – because that's what she says.
I found out about Tautology Clubs surfing online – I can't remember where. I think we need more Tautology Clubs. They are more fun than clubs for fighting, for example… because:
Rules of Tautology Club: 1. The first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club. 2. The second rule of tautology club is not the first rule of tautology club. 3. If this is your first night at tautology club, you have never been here before.
In other news, my stepmother Wendy has arrived. I got her checked into a rather posh hotel just a block away from my apartment – give her a few days of nice living to recover from jetlag before we hunt for something more affordable.
The trip to the airport and back pushed the limits of my current rather poor endurance, though. I was right to expect this "radiation holiday" to be worse (although really only slightly) than a radiation day. My latest symptom: my jaw hurts. I guess I had that before for a while – like someone punched me in the face.
So, it’s been a long time since I thought much in this mode, but I ran across something on the Marginal Revolution economics blog that was interesting to me.
There was a time, between about 2004 and 2007, when I was very close to going to business school and getting an MBA. Some people don’t know that about me. I took the GMAT, got a pretty good score (good enough to get unsolicited, pre-filled-out admissions documents from some first rate schools), and I even started the application process.
I was fascinated by the field of project management, and the idea of building teams to solve “business systems problems” such as I’d been involved in with ARAMARK and the IBM and Oracle consulting teams that were working on the comprehensive IT overhaul there (projects that ultimately failed, to the best of my knowledge, and about which I have no small number of strong opinions as to why). Then there was my work later at HealthSmart Pacific and their pharmacy division. I genuinely thought I had the ability – but I had doubts about whether I really had the drive.
“Ability without concomitant ambition” has been my curse (and motto?) since grade school. I wrote exactly that phrase on the cover of a journal I kept in high school – really.
The conclusion, obviously, was that I didn’t go to b-school. I made the decision that what I wanted instead was to follow my heart’s ambition and return to my previous career track, into teaching. Nevertheless, I sometimes think of these “paths not taken.”
This blogpost I ran across referenced, in turn, a short post at kottke.org which in turn pointed to a powerpoint (posted as PDF) by someone at Stanford. The topic is “getting things done” – but within the Silicon Valley Biz-School “Creative Destruction” discourse paradigm. The Coveyesque title is: “The Five Cognitive Distortions of People Who Get Stuff Done.” As a person who eternally struggles with getting things done, this was immediately interesting me. What do the b-school gurus have to say about it?
Schumpeter was (I think – not going to check) the originator of the “creative destruction” idea in economics, as an engine of progress and growth.
Which of those “cognitive distortions” do I have? Should I try to score myself? How do I rate, 0~10, on each of these axes?
1. Personal exceptionalism – only on good days: 4/10 2. Dichotomous thinking – terribly: 10/10 3. Correct overgeneralization – hard to judge, but I’ll say: 7/10 4. Blank canvas thinking: I’m an artist at heart: 8/10 5. Schumpeterianism: this is where I fall down: 1/10? I’m too chicken to “creatively destroy” things. I instinctively lean toward consensus-driven models of work, which, as anyone who’s tried to be a Quaker knows, is nigh impossible. I’m not clear on the theoretical relationship between a consensus model of organizational change and Schumpeter’s concepts (they’re slightly different semantic domains, clearly), but my intuition is that they’re in conflict.
So under this discourse frame, do I have a chance of getting stuff done? I’d say not excellent, but something, anyway.
Something to think about. (Picture at right: Schumpeter.)
After my radiation, which ran late due to a previous patient, I went and bought a cake and delivered it to the 10th floor east ward nurses, because I’d forgotten to yesterday. I try to go visit my old ward every week, as long as I’m on campus at the cancer center. Showing gratitude, I guess.
I took this picture of the panorama of Bukhansan, looking out the lobby window by the elevators. Much clearer than during the monsoon, when I was inpatient.
Seeing the mountains so close and so clear made me think about my brother: Andrew and Hollye went to Bukhansan to go hiking yesterday, and they camped there. Camping in Bukhansan is illegal, as far as I can figure out – it’s a National Park – yes – but it’s too close to the city to be the sort that allows camping, and nothing on any website says anything about allowing camping.
I’m not sure what to make of that. On the one hand, I definitely envy Andrew his easy anarchism – my anarchism is strong in certain theoretical respects, but vary rarely so bold in practice. In fact, on the other hand, I often worry about these things too much, and knowing he intended to try this, it was easy for me to lie awake and imagine getting some telephone call from the Korean Police in the middle of the night. In my day-to-day life and imagination, I make a big deal of “rule of law” and wish there was more respect of rules, not less.
Ultimately, it’s a difficult-to-resolve conceptual tension, for me, between a libertarian anarchism grounded in political theory and philosophy, and a belief that the social contract (a la Rousseau?) requires that we follow the rules that exist in a society, otherwise we are doomed to social fragmentation and broken polities (viz. USA, or even more so, Mexico).
I feel like I’m turning into a grumpy old man, ranting on about these things: “Those kids, what are they thinking!?” There’s always been that dynamic between Andrew and me, he being so much younger and of such a more “free-spirited” bent than I.
What I’m listening to right now.
Nerve.Filter, “Sea.Lab.” Nerve.Filter is a side project of one of the leads of the group Assemblage 23.
My student Jaeheon, in 6th grade, wrote the below in an essay written to the prompt "How can we make the world better for all humankind?" He gave three things we could do, also including his first thing – free healthcare for everyone in the world – and his third thing – unification of all the world's religions. Both those ideas are patently utopian, but his second thing was literally utopian. I quote (and, as always with student writing, I leave all mistakes and transcribe exactly as written as best I can):
Second, Change the earth to 유토피아 [yu-to-pi-a]. 유토피아 [yu-to-pi-a] is the world that work with self's ability and get the same payment. Think about it when all the people get the same payment their will be no poor and rich also there will no worry about tomorrow so all people can be happy.
If that isn't a rough round-trip-translation (English-Korean-English) of Marx's "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need," I'm not sure what is.
When I pointed out to Jaeheon that this was part of the communist program, he seemed deeply disconcerted. He said he had to think about it.
Tat tuam asi. (Tú eres esto: es decir, tú eres uno Y lo mismo que cuanto te rodea; Tú eres la cosa en sí).
El que sabe que es uno con Dios, logra el Nirvana: un Nirvana en que toda tiniebla se ilumina; vertiginoso ensanche de la conciencia humana, que es sólo proyección de la Idea Divina en el Tiempo…
El fenómeno, lo exterior, vano fruto de la ilusión, se extingue: ya no hay pluralidad, y el yo, extasiado, abísmase por fin en lo absoluto, ¡y tiene como herencia toda la eternidad!
I have finally given up my perfectionism and hit the publish button on 6 blog entries dated from July 4th through July 6th, which cover my time in the ICU after my major surgery. I may return and “touch up” some of the writing on these entries, or add some deep thought or insight if one occurs to me, but from here on they are public.
Even before the surgery it had been my intention to blog that period of time, but of course having such limited access to “the world” while in the ICU, and only fragments and scraps of paper to work with afterward, has meant that it’s been a kind “retroblogging” effort where I reconstruct my feelings and experiences of the time.
I had harbored some ambitions to cover some very deep topics, because it was an epiphanic time, and very intense (Intensive Care Unit, right?). But there’s only so much I can put together, now.
Just know that it was near the top of my list of intense experiences in my life, and utterly mind-blowing. Nor were the epiphanies merely transitory – I am confident they will grow and branch as true epiphanies do, throughout the rest of my life.
my cousin sylvia, a christian, wrote the following in reply to an earlier post of mine. since im up at 5 am anyway due to some unexpected disgusting discharge from my neck wound, i found myself taking the time to think about what she said. she wrote. . .
> I have to challenge you on this one. Calling these people evil or even calling their evangelistic efforts evil is rather "over the top." Think about what they believe (since I'm guessing it has similarities to my own beliefs). They care a lot about you in order to brave the cultural and language barriers to even talk to you. They are much more concerned about you than they are about gaining a possible proselyte. This is hardly 'solipsistic' and neither it is selfish. If this world is not all there is, they are not even 'devoid of human empathy.' Rather they are obeying the command +to 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' And how can you be sure they are wrong in what they believe?
i am unconvinced.
if it increases my discomfort and unease, if it causes those around me to flinch, then it it is devoid of empathy. you could argue that they believe that what they are doing is true and that therefore the imposition of discomfort is necessary (like a surgeons knife creating necessary discomfort in order to heal). but that opens the door to the practitioners of all religions having a right to impose their spiritual concerns. voodooists could run in and sacrfice chickens, witch doctors may wish to dance or sing. do these wellwishers of my spiritual health have a right to enter my personal space on my behalf?
no spiritual practice on my behalf has the same right of imposition as the surgeons knife for a very simple reason: i invited the knife. if i were one of those religions where my belief prohibited me from modern treatment, and i refused the knife, would you respect my wishes? likewise, can you respect my wish not to be histrionically prayed for in public, in my personal space? if you cannot, you are placing something in your worldview in a position of moral primacy over mine – invading my moral sphere with yours because you have a strong confidence that you are right and i am wrong. that is not only solipsism, but is unkindness – you give expression only to your intention, your heart, your action, and you deny me mine. allow me my autonomy and follow instead the precepcts of kindness and "do unto others."
imagine you are sick with cancer in a hospital. i care about you and im deeply concerned about not just your health but the wrongness of your beliefs. so i decide to loudly explain to you that a belief in god is wrong and you need to see the truth that there is no god so that you can have the same solace from that that i feel. would you not ask, "really? here? now? are there not more appropriate times for this conversation?"
andrew and i have had many wide ranging conversations about diverse topics. earlier today on the banal topic of if itchiness was unmitigated unpleasantness or instead might have some redeeming aspect, he used the following metaphor: "it is like evil in a newly made world."
we laughed. we both agreed that as a metaphor for itchiness it was a bit of overkill, but the phrase has echoed in my mind since then as utterly brilliant. evil in a newly made world is surely a particularly egregious variety of evil.
after i ate dinner andrew went out to exercise. the woman sitting with the sick man from the next bed over came over and started making conversation with me – in korean. she gave the standard 3rd degree about family, etc, and said my brother was very handsome. but then she asked me about my church and religion.
im ok making small talk in korean but debating religion is far beyond my ability. she was persistent, so i became more assertive that i was buddhist (which provides fewer angles for attack than claiming atheism), but this was one case where she could not let up. she dissolved into an almost tearful pleading with me in which really i could only make out the korean words for prayer and jesus and god.
i felt uncomfortable. i tried to broaden my smile and said only, in my poor korean, i have my strength. i pressed by hands together in the gesture shared by buddhists and christians.
these neighbors are hardcore pentecostals of some kind – they spend most of their time in bible study and prayer vigils – and who am i to begrudge them their solace? but this is not the first time one member or another of that family group have decided to direct their evangelical zeal outward. i had thought i was immune, being the foreigner in the room, but clearly i was mistaken.
it strikes me as an expression of deep, almost solipsistic selfishness that could impel this kind of behavior in a cancer ward. perhaps it is to this class of evangelism-devoid-of-human-empathy to which i might decide to apply andrews metaphor: like evil in a newly made world.
i awoke from a dream at about five am. in and of itself, that is a great sign, as with rare exceptions i dont sleep well enough at night these days to even be able to dream in my normal way.
but the dream was completely disorienting. they wanted to prepare me for a new surgery. the doctors were using these little tags to identify potential problems and to get a feel for my psychological state . . this last was important because the surgery was to be a kind of brain surgery.
but they were imposing a maddening rule – every word i used on the little tags could only be used once. over and over i would be confronted with a situation like this: i would write a word on the tag in answer to a question and be told, you already used that word. someone would point to the tag where the word was used in the vast proliferation of tags.
i kept trying to find multilingual synonyms. . i would write one time "pee" and be told nope you used that. "urine" id venture. . nope. hmm, "소변"? no look its written down here. why cant you do this?. . you need to help us to take care of you but how can we when you cant do this simple thing? finally, "orina" and a dismissive smile but quickly dissolving into a new unanswerable question.
the dream went on and on like that. . . a linguists nightmare hospital stay. do you realize how dangerous this will be if you dont have the right labels?
I wrote the below a week ago but didn’t publish. Since conversations with my friend Grace inevitably spend some time on religion (she is a struggling yet deeply committed Christian who has always been pretty good at letting me be different without evangelizing), I thought it slightly relevant now. We had even been talking briefly about CS Lewis.
Quite some time ago, I ran across a lost, dog-eared copy of C.S. Lewis’s The Last Battle (edition cover image at right).
Way back when I was a child, in my efforts to read the Narnia books, I’d never read this one – at the time, I’d become annoyed with the overt Christian symbolism of these books. I later went on to greatly appreciate much of Lewis’s other writing – I profoundly love his Space Trilogy even today, and consider those books to be very important and formative books for me, even though they’re just as overt in their Christian symbolism as the Narnia books. I read a number of his non-fiction works, too, during my long struggle with (or against) faith in my 20’s, including Surprised by Joy and The Screwtape Letters. He is probably my favorite Christian writer.
So about a month and a half ago I started reading The Last Battle – it joined the giant “pile” of books-in-progress that is the entirety of my apartment’s flat surfaces. I finished it a few days ago.
The symbolism is undeniable, but his take is one I can appreciate despite my own divergent belief system. I don’t like some of the seeming racism that peeks through the symbolism, however – especially the caricature of Islam that is the prominent role played by the humans called Calormenes in the story.
So one thing that surprised me and that I deeply appreciate is the tale of the Calormene who gets caught up in Aslan’s (Christ’s) procession up into heaven at the end of the book. The Calormene is a faithful Calormene – he has been a loyal servant of “Tash” (Allah / The Devil) and so he doesn’t understand how it is Aslan has welcomed him. Aslan explains that (I’ll paraphrase and interpret, here, extensively) it’s not his dogma that matters, but his works. His faithfulness, his kindness, his loyalty – these are the things Aslan looks for and rewards. “I take to me the services which thou hast done to him [Tash]. For I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him.” Finally, “Beloved, said the Glorious One, unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek.”
That last sentence, “For all find what they truly seek,” has an almost Buddhist character.
If only more people who claim to be Christian could view my own divergent path with this kind of openminded equanimity – I’d have less quarrel with them.
In maudlin moments, I find myself speculating that I have been some kind of “tragedy magnet” in this life.
This is ridiculous, of course. My life is perhaps more tragic than the lives of some others, if one wants to inspect it on those terms. But it is still so much less tragic than many, many lives. It’s just a life.
Humans, collectively, are perhaps better conceptualized as tragedy magnets than any individual. We perceive tragedy, and that allows us to draw tragedy around us like a proudly worn, tattered cloak.
13 years ago this week, my wife Michelle committed suicide. We were separated, but talk of divorce wasn’t at that moment on the table. It was a complicated time, and painful.
In my more self-punishing moments, I could imagine that I brought her suicide on, myself. Or that she and I, together, brought that tragedy on ourselves. After all, she and I chose the lives we were making… or failing to make.
But then life went on, after that.
In that same kind of self-punishing moment, I wonder how much of my current cancer (now that the doctors are calling it that without circumspection) is the result of “incorrect thinking.” I don’t mean that I’m conceptualizing this newly discovered illness as a kind of punishment for sins, because I don’t believe in sins – but rather, I’m talking about psychosomatic processes: a somatic expression of my broken psyche.
Of course there are senses in which this is true. There are senses, though, in which it is not true.
Scientifically – medically – psyche plays a role (via the way that stress impacts the body, if nothing more), but there are many other factors: genetics, pollution in the environment, bad habits of diet or tobacco (when I was much younger, if referring to me specifically) or lack of exercise, or even random stray cosmic rays zapping just the wrong molecules of DNA at just the wrong moment.
But cumulatively, my psyche has a job to do, too, and so I sometimes imagine I’ve brought this onto myself.
Should I just let it run its course? Is this creature meant to be fought?
Such a futile thing: to purchase a few more years, of uncertain quality, in exchange for a price of a vast amount of treasure and energy and willpower and yes, pain. I really don’t like pain.
Below, an utterly random and definitely unseasonal picture from my archive: the frozen Lake in Ilsan in January, 2009.
Those footprints in the snow on the frozen ice… There I go.
I have been trying to write what are called Sapphic stanzas – an originally Greek poetic form that has a long history of adaptation in English, including efforts by Hardy, Kipling and Ginsberg.
I’m not sure about the typical thematics – sapphics seem to be used for odes and narrative poetry. They are in any event considered difficult and ill-fitted to natural English rhythms, better suited to the rolling polysyllables of Greek or Latin.
Still, I think I got the metics right in this little single stanza. I like it well enough to share it, anyhow, although it’s in the category of a sketch rather than a completed work. (Poem #13 on new numbering scheme)
"A Moment."
Clouds that parse the sky with their fractal, cold hands;
Trees held captive struggling against the strong earth,
Branches dividing, air is displaced with green thrusts:
only a moment.
Something in the metrical pattern strikes me as reminiscent of Robinson Jeffers. I suppose given his background in classics, his poetry was full of such meters as these. Here are two short excerpts of his poetry, which share a theme, which is not the theme of my poem above. These are also clearly not sapphics – indeed, I didn’t really invest the energy to figure out what they might be, but regardless there’s clearly something “classical” in the metrics.
Dear God, who are the whole splendor of things and the sacred stars, but also the cruelty and greed, the treacheries And vileness, insanities and filth and anguish: now that this thing comes near us again I am finding it hard To praise you with a whole heart. – “Contemplation of The Sword” (1938)
I have seen these ways of God: I know of no reason For fire and change and torture and the old returnings. – “Apology for Bad Dreams” (1927)
The picture (found online) is of of Jeffers’ “Tor House” which he built by hand (in the 1920’s and 30’s) near Carmel, California.
I saw an article (hattip to Sullydish) that talks about some study that shows that legoguy facial expressions have been getting angrier over time. This is … interesting, and utterly plausible. I would not place myself in the camp that views this as some kind of reflection of our society’s broad decline or somesuch – at worst, I think it merely reflects Lego Corporation’s growing cynicism vis-a-vis the global toy market and their role in popular culture.
I have always loved Legos. I’m too old to have played directly with Lego minifigures myself as a child. My own legos were simpler than what the toy series later became. But the minifigures came out in time for my younger brother to have had many of them, and later, my stepson had a large collection, too.
At one point, I invented some very elaborate stories about a Lego civilization called Legotopia with my stepson. I even wrote some of them down in the mid 1990’s, but a lot of those things I wrote down during that period were lost because of the disasterous Hard Drive Failure of 1998.
I recall that I had drawn a kind of map of Legotopia, which included a large city called Legoville in the center, and then various surrounding kingdoms and lands, such as a County of Towers (lots of Lego towers and a medieval theme), a Duchy of Roses (lots of pastoral Lego creations on the old Belleville theme), as well as a kind of “wild west” called Castle Pass. It was all more of a universe-creation project than it was a germ of a novel or series of short stories.
I always vividly imagined these lands and places populated by seething masses of undifferentiated “legoguys” with their quotidian struggles and triumphs. I’ve always called them “legoguys” (even the “girls” are called legoguys) – I’m not sure if the original coinage is mine or my brother’s. I made an emperor in Legotopia who went by the moniker of Legoguy XVII – as a proper name, appropriate to the leader of their grand civilization. He was the most generic-looking legoguy I could find in my stepson’s collection.
I still have a (very small) collection of Legos, which I have on occasion shared with some of my students (like the large Lego alligator that lives on my desk at work). Informal survey: I currently own 6 legoguys; two of them are angry. The picture I snapped just now, above right, shows one of them, battling a legogator.
Boltzmann's entropy formula is S = k log W. I ran across this somewhere, and decided I wanted to understand it.
I failed to understand it, but I read about it for quite a while, skipping over the equations for the most part. Then I found some new blogs about various things and then I found this video about God and Nature instead, a blog called Preposterous Universe.
Quite some time back, I translated (or, rather, attempted to translate) a list of 108 Korean Buddhist affirmations, which I had initially encountered on a Buddhist
television channel in early 2010, but then subsequently
researched and found online.
After having finished that little translation project more than a year and a half ago, I have finally decided to put the complete list in a single place (instead of being scattered through 108 blog entries, using the “create page” functionality of my blog host (a “page” is different from a “post” in that it isn’t a dated entry but a sort of stand-alone entry).
Here is my newly-created page of the 108 affirmations with translations.
One thing I have wondered about is if these affirmations were natively Korean, or if they derived from some older tradition. There is definitely a tradition in the wider Buddhist sphere of creating lists of 108 affirmations, prayers, or other types of things, but I haven’t run across this particular list of affirmations (I mean in terms of the content of their meanings). I don’t have the linguistic ability to research very thoroughly or effectively, though. If the Korean 108 affirmations came from somewhere, they were likely mediated through classical Chinese, about which I know nil. I’m a little better with Pali (the Prakrit language of the core Buddhist scriptures – only in that I can muddle through the abjad and/or find romanized versions that are vaguely decipherable or provided with translations), but I haven’t seen anything like this list in Pali.
I recently learned that China acquired Buddhism from the Gandharan civilization – which was the Indo-Hellenic civilization in the upper Indus valley and the Kush (i.e. modern Northwest Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan). This is interesting to think about, as it leads to scholarly speculation as to the level of influence between classical Greek thought (I’m thinking here of the same currents of Platonist and neo-Platonist thought that so strongly influenced the New Testament) and the evolution of Mahayana Buddhism (i.e. as practiced in the “North”: China, Korea, Japan, etc.) as distinct from Theraveda Buddhism (i.e. as practiced in the “South”: Sri Lanka, Burma, India, Thailand, etc.). The so-called “Esoteric” Buddhism of Tibet and Bhutan is a third strain that has its own history.
I took the picture below in June, 2010, visiting 원효사 (Wonhyo Temple) near Gwangju.
Swá ðá maélceare maga Healfdenes singála séað· ne mihte snotor hæleð wéan onwendan· wæs þæt gewin tó swýð láþ ond longsum þe on ðá léode becóm, nýdwracu níþgrim nihtbealwa maést.
So then over the sorrow of the time the son of Half-Dane continually brooded; the wise hero could not turn away woe; that strife was too strong, hateful and enduring, that on the people came fearfully cruel, violent trouble, the greatest night-evil.
Tolkien dated the poem to the 8th century – and this was Tolkien’s specific area of expertise, as he was a professor of English Philology. Other scholars have thought the poem Beowulf to be younger, but certainly it is at least 1000 years old.
I like the poem because it offers a window into such an ancient, different world, but I like it mostly as a fabulous exemplar of language-change. Presumeably, the first and second texts, above, are the same language, separated only by 1000 years of history. But what makes a language a language? And in that vein, in what way is, for example, the “Korean” of today the same language as the “Korean” used in the Silla Era (pre 900 AD)?
Sometimes I have a dream that is so strange, yet so evidently autobiographical and symbolic, that as I caress its memory traces upon awaking, I think to myself, “people will think I made this up – no one dreams like that.”
So I must aver at the outset, I really dreamed this dream.
Which isn’t to say I didn’t make it up, too. Of course, as we awake and shuffle past the curlicues of fog that shrouded our sleeping state, the memories shift and take on form as a narrative that wasn’t really present in the dream. At least some if not most of the creativity in dreaming gets applied here, maybe. I don’t think, however, that that means I made the dream up, in any intentionalist sense.
I hesitate to report it, because as dreams go it was so very strange. But I will tell it, nevertheless – because that’s one of the things I do on This Here Blog Thingy™ that almost no one else does, and somehow, doing so thus means more to me vis-a-vis asserting my bloggish individuality over this peculiar format than most of the other things I do here.
I had decided to return to graduate school. In the dream, it was clear this had been a very fast, impulsive decision – perhaps taken over a long weekend, perhaps taken while drinking soju with coworkers. I had made the decision out of frustration with the current trajectory of my life.
I was accepted into UC Irvine. Keep in mind, in my real life, I have never even visited UC Irvine’s campus, but it has a certain plausibility around it, given my Southern California links. The year I spent working in Long Beach was actually, mostly, a year spent working at a client location in Costa Mesa, only a few miles from UCI. So it wasn’t something utterly random, perhaps.
I packed my possessions out of my apartment here in Korea (where somehow all my possessions in storage in Minnesota were also crammed into my apartment). I loaded everything into my Nissan pickup truck that I owned from 2001 until 2010, and drove to UCI.
I drove. It wasn’t something strange, in the dream. Just driving from Seoul to Orange County. It took a long time – but no more than a day or two. It was like driving from Oregon to Orange County.
When I arrived at the campus, UCI was in a Mexican beach town, but a rather posh one. I suppose that’s actually a pretty accurate description of much of Orange County. It was much greener than what we think of as Mexican beach towns – the green hills around the campus resembled northern Baja in winter, when the rains make everything verdant but trees are sparse. I remember looking down a long street as I parked my pickup truck and thinking there were a lot of nice sailboats in the harbor.
I went into a large, glass-faced office tower to find it divided up into various departments. Oddly, most of the departments were “city government”-type departments – a police department on one floor, a sewer department on another, yet another area had the offices of the city bus system. There was also a retail area with some upscale shops, like the Costa Mesa mall, and a food court, and alongside the food court was the Comparative Literature department. This is the first time in the dream where I knew what subject I’d returned to graduate school to study.
I met a friendly woman at a desk, there. There were stressed out grad students dozing in very stylish-looking cubicles made of polished blonde natural wood, decorated with tasteful personal effects. The woman began introducing me to various people in the department, although remarkably, there were no professors. “The department is run as a collective,” she pointed out. One of the other students muttered something about Juche (the North Korean ideological system). Really?
I was self-conscious of being so much older than most of the students. I was introduced to a man half my age who would be my “mentor” – he had the remarkably fitting dream-name of Earnest Young. He had blond hair and a goatee. He asked me to tell him about myself. I began to tell him a rather redacted personal history, in Spanish, but after a while we ended up talking about my negative experiences with graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania. At some point he said, candidly, that his Spanish wasn’t so good, and we switched to English. I had the feeling that maybe he wasn’t impressed with my Spanish and had offered to switch out of pity, but he’d said very little in the language, so I decided I was being paranoid.
We were interrupted by the woman from the front desk, who took me around to meet some of the other students. Then, I was introduced to an older woman with graying hair who was apparently part of the building’s janitorial staff, but she was being treated as a full member of the group. She was laughing at humorless in-jokes being made by a forceful younger woman with “Occupy Philosophy” written on her tee shirt.
I bowed to the older cleaning lady and greeted her in Korean. This impressed the other students, but the cleaning lady returned my bow and offered me a large plate with exactly two orange cheezits on it. I took the plate politely, and was about to eat the cheezits when I saw that written on them were the words “아무것 없다” [“There is nothing”]. I looked at the woman with alarm, but she just smiled shyly and enigmatically, and returned to her cart of cleaning supplies and began dusting an unoccupied cubicle.
I was feeling uncomfortable by this secret message I’d received, so I put the plate of cheezits aside on the desk that had been assigned to me, and resumed my orientation chat with Earnest Young.
He was explaining that we had to teach our own classes under a sort of rotating leadership. My first class that I had to lead would be about Witold Gombrowicz [this is very significant in the context of this dream, but very hard to explain – Gombrowicz is connected in my mind with the problem and aesthetic of apophenia]. There were some administrative details I didn’t understand, but I decided to let it slide for now.
Then I looked back at the plate of cheezits after a few minutes and there was a very small sculpture of a monkey gazing at the cheezits, as if it was hungry. The monkey turned its head and met my eyes intelligently. I shivered, feeling a sort of nervous, conspiratorial fear, as if the universe had shrugged and uttered, “Gombrowicz, indeed.”
I was tired. “Where will I sleep?” I asked.
The earnest Mr. Young glanced at me, surprised. “Oh, you don’t know. We will probably assign you to ‘Camp One.'”
I asked for an explanation. “We take the collective nature of our undertaking very seriously,” he explained, earnestly. Apparently, they lived like Occupy protestors, in large recycled Army tents in the modernist plaza outside the building, where there was a large sculpture in the style of Picasso’s amazing work in Daley Plaza in Chicago [That sculpture is a recurring character in my dreams].
“The views of the mountains are excellent,” the young Earnest pointed out. “And the outside air is invigorating.”
I shrugged, but remembered a problem. “I don’t have a sleeping bag.”
He looked at me, eyes bugging out, as if to say, ‘how could you neglect to bring something so important as a sleeping bag to a comparative literature graduate program?‘
I apologized, and mumbled something about how Penn had obviously habituated me to a different sort of graduate program, altogether.
He grinned, forgiving me. “Yeah, we don’t follow that old Penn style. We’re progressive.”
I nodded, and added for no apparent reason, “Like Columbia?”
“Maybe. I haven’t been there. This is a different world,” he said, gesturing around. The signs were in Korean, now, in the food court, and a large number of people were emerging from what was clearly a Seoul subway station stairway. Yet peering out a large window I could still see the green hills and the harbor with sailboats in the distance. So I had to agree it was a different world.
“I’m really tired,” I finally said.
“You’ll get to sleep, soon. But first, we’re meeting to watch cartoons.” He described a restaurant or bar location across the street from the tents where I would be staying. “Let’s meet there in about 30 minutes.”
“What are we watching,” I asked.
He waxed enthusiastic. “Oh, it’s a fabulous new program,” he exclaimed. “It’s called ‘pork the orkville opiates.'”
This title for a cartoon was so bizarre, so incongruous and yet hilarious, that I began to laugh.
I immediately woke up. Am I the only one who has noticed that a dream state cannot sustain an active, laughing subject? Do I begin to “sleep-laugh” in actual fact, when these dream-laughs occur?
“Orkville,” by the way, isn’t just some random name. When I was maybe 7 or 8 years old, I had a collection of stuffed toys that were perhaps intended to be alligators, but they stood upright and came in unusual colors, like blue and red and yellow. I had decided that these were definitely not alligators (even then, alligators!), but rather “orks.” My mother, a fan of Tolkien before Tolkien fandom was a thing, asked me if Orcs weren’t horrible, brutish and unkind creatures. I told my mother in no uncertain terms that no, those were “C-orcs, spelled with the letter ‘c’.” My orks were “K-orks, spelled with the letter ‘k’.” I clarified that K-orks were, in fact, vegetarians, and lived a communistic life in an amphibious riverine utopia named Orkville. I drew several maps and wrote a constitution for the place. I later invented a language for them, with an abjad writing system. I had one Ork named Barnabus York, and another named Merriweather Shadow. They were metaphysical detectives. I drew geneologies for them stretching back 50 generations, to show they were related.This was when I was 7 or 8. I was smarter when I was a child.
Even now, I’m still feeling rotten. I’ve been on antibiotics for two weeks now, and the earache pain is intense most of the time. I don’t know what the solution is. Will have to shop for alternate medical care next week, I’m thinking.
I came home from work exhausted – Saturday is my busiest day, in fact, for work, at least in terms of class-load. I made some late lunch for myself and crashed on my sofa, intending to read, and suddenly I was asleep.
I had turned on streaming NPR on my computer before sleeping, and so I awoke to a man being interviewed on BBC’s World Service. He said – if I remember correctly:
“Who knows about money? It flows like the spirit.”
This struck me as incredibly profound, to hear this said in the moment of waking up.
The man being interviewed was Daniel Libeskind, a Polish/Israeli/American architect, quite popular these days in the skyscraper-building set (e.g. New York’s WTC 2.0 “Freedom Tower” and other projects such as Seoul’s Archipelago 21). He went on to discourse on why he didn’t feel a need to apologize for working with totalitarian regimes, as a child of Stalinist Poland, in which I heard an implicit equivalence between China the West (one which I’m sympathetic to hearing, in point of fact, in certain moods).
I did something that haven’t done in many, many years: I read a book from front-to-back, linearly, in less than a week. I spent the greatest part of my unexpected day off, today, finishing it, having just started it on Monday morning – today was Korean Memorial Day, but with a late night at work last night and work bearing down on me again for tomorrow, I had nothing planned.
Furthermore, it was a novel.
Mostly, these days, I read history or philosophy. It’s been a very long time since I finished a novel or any piece of fiction (except some short stories) in less than half a year. Inevitably, at any given moment, I have maybe a dozen books “in progress,” and the majority of them never get finished at all in any conventional sense, because I read them the way some people surf the internet, essentially at random.
So I felt a little bit surprised, myself, with how I compulsively sat and paged my way through this 500-page book, not once looking ahead, not once skimming past a slow-moving section. This behavior may have had more to do with my circumstances: I continue to be painfully sick, thus not feeling healthy enough to go out exploring much; and I continue to feel a grinding dissatisfaction with my life as-it-is (e.g. with work and studies) that pushes me into a more widely-ranging and totalizing escapism than I’ve been wont to practice so much in recent years, maybe.
You’re wondering, what was the book that I read? I’m not even sure I can strongly recommend it. Superficially, it’s been characterized by others as a “steampunk fantasy western” which is basically a way to say it’s several genres mishmashed together. It had moments when it reminded me of something almost like one of the Latin American magic realists’ alternate worlds, or maybe those Nabokovian parallel Earths of lesser-known works like Ada or Pale Fire, but minus the utterly unequalable virtuosity of that old Russian’s prose. It’s definitely not to the level of anything like those. Further, I agree with those reviewers who felt that the ending was rushed and unsatisfying, but I’m willing to forgive it.
There’s a lot going on politically and philosophically, and the protagonists are mostly unlikable – yet nevertheless ambivalently complicated, which I find makes a book more compelling and interesting in some strange way. I find myself wanting to see them self-destruct, or find some epiphanic solution to their problem, or save the world despite themselves. Then when they mostly fail I get to feel good about my ability to have judged them accurately.
That makes it sound terrible. It wasn’t. I liked it. I may even look for the sequel, allegedly recently released.
The bees build in the crevices Of loosening masonry, and there The mother birds bring grubs and flies. My wall is loosening; honey-bees, Come build in the empty house of the stare.
We are closed in, and the key is turned On our uncertainty; somewhere A man is killed, or a house burned, Yet no clear fact to be discerned: Come build in he empty house of the stare.
A barricade of stone or of wood; Some fourteen days of civil war; Last night they trundled down the road That dead young soldier in his blood: Come build in the empty house of the stare.
We had fed the heart on fantasies, The heart's grown brutal from the fare; More Substance in our enmities Than in our love; O honey-bees, Come build in the empty house of the stare.
– William Butler Yeats (part 6 from a 1923 longer poem "Meditations in time of Civil War").
Note that the word "stare" here is an Irishism for the bird called starling, I think. And the civil war in question is the Irish war for independence from the UK.
I really like this poem. It combines something deep and symbolic with a very immediate observation of nature in the moment.
오늘의 나를 완전히 죽여야 내일의 내가 태어나는 것이다. 새로운 나로 변신하려면 기존의 나를 완전히 버려야 한다. 너는 네 자신의 불길로 너 스스로를 태워버릴 각오를 해야 하리라. 먼저 재가 되지 않고서 어떻게 거듭나길 바랄 수 있겠는가? – 니체
This past week, my boss has been even more gnomically obscure and dyspeptically cryptic than usual. One night a few days ago, during a break between classes, he was taping up some of his characteristic aphorisms in a prominent place by the door out of the staffroom, printed in large print on bright goldenrod paper. In Korean, of course.
I said, as is my wont, “What’s that?” I sit close to the staffroom door, so I was just making conversation while he taped his papers up.
At first he was dismissive. “These are not important,” he said. By which he normally means they’re not important to me – being in Korean, I suppose.
But then he reconsidered. “Do you want to understand these?”
I nodded, dubiously.
“Then read them. They could change your life.”
“Gee thanks,” I remarked, though my sarcasm is often lost on the Koreans around me. “Can you send me an electronic copy? That makes it easier for me to research them.”
He did. So I spent some time the last few days puzzling through some boss-sourced aphorisms.
Lo and behold, I found myself attempting to read Nietzsche, in Korean (see above, at the top of this blog post).
You might think, with all the Nietzsche I’ve read, that I’d be able to figure out the source of the quote – the quote only said “니체” [ni-che = Nietzsche] and didn’t specify a book or volume. But after a lot of effort at translation, I’m clueless.
The text is definitely Nietzschean in character, and the snippet my boss shared is quite popular on Korean blog sites, but it’s never properly attributed, that I’ve been able to find. I decided to not try to find the source any more, and just give as workmanlike a translation as I can manage.
오늘의 나를 죽여야 today me-OBJ die-CAUSE 내일의 내가 태어날 수 있다. tomorrow I-SUBJ born-POSSIBLE “I must die today in order to be born tomorrow.”
오늘의 나를 완전히 죽여야 today-GEN me-OBJ completely die-CAUSE 내일의 내가 태어나는 것이다. tomorrow-GEN I-SUBJ born-PERIPRES “I must die completely today in order that I am [re-]born tomorrow.”
새로운 나로 변신하려면 new-PPART me-ABL transform-CAUSE 기존의 나를 완전히 버려야 한다. existing me-OBJ completely discard-INTENT-PRES “To transform into the new me I am ready to discard the [currently] existing me completely.”
너는 네 자신의 불길로 you-TOPIC your self-GEN flame-ABL 너 스스로를 태워버릴 각오를 해야 하리라. you REFLX-OBJ burn-off-FUTPART resolution-OBJ do-INTENT-TRY “You must resolve to burn off yourself in your own flames.”
먼저 재가 되지 않고서 firstly I-SUBJ become-SUSP not-AND-THEN 어떻게 거듭나길 바랄 수 있겠는가? how be-reborn-GER-OBJ hope-FUTPART possible have-FUT-SPEC “[If] I don’t first finish how could I be reborn?”
As long as we’re on a Nietzsche kick, here’s another quote I rather like.
What if a demon were to creep after you one night, in your loneliest
loneliness, and say, ‘This life which you live must be lived by you once
again and innumerable times more; and every pain and joy and thought
and sigh must come again to you, all in the same sequence. The eternal
hourglass will again and again be turned and you with it, dust of the
dust!’ Would you throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse that
demon? Or would you answer, ‘Never have I heard anything more divine’?
