Episteme

I just started reading an anthology of prehispanic literature, and something caught my eye, maybe because it feels so timeless.

Sobre la forma en que se ha de portar el que va en un camino

Cuando sigas tu camino,
no vayas viendo a un lado y otro, sino que
pondras atencion al camino.
No iras dando palmadas, no iras haciendo zigzag en el camino.
No iras agarrando del cuello a otro,
no iras agarrando a otro por la mano.
No iras diciendo bufonadas;
no miraras con detencion la cara a las personas;
no pasaras entre las personas,
no te iras a colocar delante de ellas,
a no ser que seas mandado.

[Literatura Mexicana, Maria del Carmen Millan. Translation follows.]

When you follow your path,
On the behavior of one who is following a path

Do not go from one side to another, instead
pay attention to the path.
Don't hit anyone, do not zigzag from one side of the path to the other.
Don't grab the neck of another,
don't take another's hand.
Don't turn your head from one side to the other.
Don't insult anyone;
Don't look anyone in the eye for long;
Don't go among people,
Don't place yourself ahead of them,
doing what you were not sent to do.

When I read this passage in Spanish, the first thing I noticed was the idea of focus. I think that it may be very literal - the writer could really be telling a messenger or worker how to get from one place to another without getting into a fight or causing problems for others. It could be a way of efficiently getting the job done. But it also seems like good advice for other aspects of life. Just as the messenger needs to remember his way and keep a straight trajectory, we all need to focus on our path once we find it, avoiding conflicts with others and the tendency to become distracted. The messenger must look straight ahead and shouldn't hit or grab the neck of another, but he also shouldn't grab their hands. I took this to be a warning against conflict, but also a statement of the need for independence - the messenger should not depend on another person to bring him ahead. The last two lines continue the same point - he needs to avoid getting mixed up with others in a way that could deter him from the task he was sent for.

In a way this can apply to a lot of us. We have dreams and goals, but so many times we zigzag along as we try to get there, looking from side to side like a distracted tribal messenger. Relationships, good and bad, make us forget what we have inside of ourselves, the things that have the potential to drive us forward into the future with a sense of excitement and purpose. I like this poem because it shows that focus is a mental excercise that is a challenge for all of humanity.

Another thing that I think is worth mentioning about this section of my book on Mexican literature is that indigenous culture is so undervalued here to the point where racism is a way of life and class distinctions are pronounced to a point I've never seen in my lifetime in the United States, except in ugly vestiges of our conflicted past. Here it's all out in the open. That's one of the reasons why I want to look more at what these cultures have to offer, to begin to privilege it in my thinking and writing.

Today on the subway I saw a man enter the car without his shirt on and the first thing I noticed was that his back was scratched and scarred in hundreds of tiny little lines at different stages of healing. He carried a white t-shirt, through the aisle, looking purposeful, and I wondered what he could be doing. He put the shirt down on the ground about 10 feet away from me, one doorway down and flattened it out, and there was a pile of broken pieces of glass inside. He stood up in a handstand against the door of the car, with tens of people watching, fell down onto the pile of broken glass and rolled back and forth over it. He repeated it a few times, then got up as if nothing had happened and collected tips. I looked away for most of it, but it made me think. It made me think about the level of desperation you have to be in to think that a show of extreme pain is a good way to earn enough money to eat. This man's performance wasn't the pandering act of a man who could get a job if he wanted to but who's become to accustomed to the dysfunction of poverty to look for one. This is a glimpse of a type of desperation that I've never seen before today, and I think it has to do with the fact that everyone is overlooking that value of the people who were here before the Europeans. I think it's all connected.

Posted by Kim at 07:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jane Jacobs died this week while I was in the middle of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. I saw her give a lecture at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco little more than a year ago. If I had read her book(s) at the time, I probably would remember more of what she said, but I do remember is how she got into writing, urban planning and journalism: all by accident. She loved New York City, what made it New York City, at a time when the great experiment of suburbanism was getting underway and people were evacuating cities as though to escape pestilence.

I didn't live in a proper urban setting until college when I moved to San Francisco. I loved it. I still love it. I don't live there now, but close enough to pretend I do, and I fantasize about living, once again, in a big city. Suburbs aren't bad; the one I grew up was beautiful enough but banal. Life closing down at 9 p.m. doesn't inspire much beyond an enduring sense of ennui. That's how I could characterize my high schools years.

OK, so Jacobs. What I really liked about Jacobs during her lecture was how funny she was. Her book changed everything about city planning and what was evident was how much she loved cities, especially her adopted home, Toronto. In today's New York Times, their storyon Jacobs (in Week in Review) was encapsulates the ethos of her most famous book perfectly:

"An urban flâneur of the first order, she reminded us that cities could only be fully understood with our eyes, feet and ears — not from the distant abstraction of architectural drawings."

What surprised me about Jacobs and her writing is its highly technical but lucid nature. I decided to read the book because I do focus on planning issues in my own writing and what I've come to understand (from talking with planners) is that urban planning is really social engineering. It's about designed and organizing the way people interact with each other. That's a rather romantic take, to be sure, and the language used to dictate planning is anything but, so the business of designing cities is really hard for that reason.

For Jacobs, the city began and ended with people. That's what makes cities important and defines the experience of being in one: "Real people are unique, they invest years of their lives in significant relationships with other unique people, and are not interchangeable in the least. Severed from their relationships, they are destroyed as effective social beings - sometimes for a little while, sometimes forever." I have to remind myself this is a book about city planning.

I didn't know it until reading her book, but what I love about city-living is this: "it is possible in a city street neighborhood to know all kinds of people without unwelcome entanglements, without boredom, necessity for excuses, explanations, fears of giving offense, embarrassments respecting impositions or commitments, and all such paraphernalia of obligations which can accompany less limited relationships. It is possible to be on excellent terms with people who are very different from oneself, and even, as time passes, on familiar public terms with them. Such relationships can, and do, endure for many years, for decades; they could never be formed without that line, much less endured. They form precisely because they are the by-the-way to people's normal public sorties."

Filed Under City, Current Events, Sociology

Posted by Dawn at 12:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Maybe historical progression, human progress, advancement, is based on our desire to be recognized. So Fukuyama says of Hegel's idea. Not having read Hegel, I can't really add much more to that idea but in reading The End of History, this idea stood out to me (buried, it was, page 135, amid streams and streams of other ideas) because that seems to be central to our lives as individuals. People want to have children, so I'm guessing, because some level they want their genetic legacy to go beyond them, some flesh and blood embodiment carry on after they've died. When you're dead, what does it matter? But that's just me pooh-poohing the idea that children ever really embody their parents.

OK, so where I wanted to take this diatribe is to the pages of The Denial of Death, one of the seminal texts of my life. That notion of recognition on a macro level (self-determination, former colonies writing their own history and determining their identity outside the colonial paradigm (Said has some interesting things to say about this in Culture and Imperialism) makes me think of the same struggle on micro, personal level, and what Ernest Becker (author of the aforementioned book) says about our "central calling, our main task on this planet, is the heroic." This is psychoanalysis, whose trappings I've completely fallen into (luckily without seeing an actual analyst) because as I read it, this seems to come to close to explaining why we are the way we are and how we can remedy or at least understand our shortcomings.

So this is what Becker has to say, causing me to draw the mental parallel: "(man) must desperately justify himself as an object of primary value in the universe; he must stand out, be a hero, make the biggest possible contribution to world life, show that he counts more than anything to anyone else."

Fukuyama writes of Hegel's idea, it "gives us a broader understanding of man - 'man as man' - that allows us to understand the discontinuities, the wars and sudden eruptions of irrationality out of the calm of economic development, that have characterized actual human history."

Are we motivated by our inner longing for recognition on a personal level (based on our fear of death) in the same way a nation of people is also desires recognition? Becker, to Fukuyama, in this little conversation I've created, says, "The fact is that this is what society is and always has been: a symbolic action, a structure of statuses and roles, customs and rules for behavior, designed to serve as a vehicle for earthly heroism."

Is democracy the best form of that expression or symbolic action? Are we freest in a democracy to determine our identities than, say, in a dictatorship? Or are we in democracies (especially in the West) so preoccupied by consumerism that we only imagine we are free to strive for recognition when really we're simply slaves to our material consumption? Or we do strive for such things to fulfill our consumerist desires and unconsciously feel that we are cheating death? On a macro level, is the move toward democracy our way of achieving the same end by agitating for a political structure that supports it? After 9/11, Bush did tell us to go shopping.

Posted by Dawn at 06:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

German director Werner Herzog (whose movies I've never seen) captures perfectly the spirit of tenuous humanity (something I think about every time I see the pyramids of apples in the grocery store):

"Herzog was born in Munich, the capital of Bavaria, in 1942. The disaster of Nazism, he said, informs his brooding world view. 'I try to understand the ocean beneath the thin layer of ice that is civilization,' he said. 'There's miles and miles of deep ocean, of darkness and barbarism. And I know the ice can break easily.'"

From a recent issue of The New Yorker.

Filed Under Philosophy, Current Events

Posted by Dawn at 08:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For Neruda, the identity of the poet expands to encompass all the world. That positioning of the poetic I is one of the things that gives his poetry the rhythm and reach that it has, seeming to unify the entire world under one blanket of beauty, pain and philosophy. In "Yo voy a vivir" (1949), one of the last poems in Neruda's great work, Canto General, he speaks of living on as a part of humanity.

"Yo no voy a morirme. Salgo ahora,
en este dia lleno de volcanes
hacia la multitud, hacia la vida." (lines 1-3)

This is very characteristic of this book - he is coming out of himself and joining the rest of us, and that is his form of immortality. But there are things that he rejects, that he will not encompass in his ongoing self. He's going to leave behind the ugliness of the world, while he joins the positive force of humanity.

"Aqui dejo arregladas estas cosas
hoy que los pistoleros se pasean
con la "cultura occidental" en brazos,
con las manos que matan en Espana
y las horcas que oscilan en Atenas
y la deshonra que gobierna a Chile
y paro de contar."

He's going to see the mess of humanity from a distance, but his energy will remain in the world. It's a real critique of the current culture - the Spanish Civil War, the Chilean prohibition of Communism with the Ley Maldita of 1948, the violence of the streets that claims innocent victims and robs them of their freedom to live peacefully. Neruda was exiled from Chile for his communism and fled to Argentina on horseback over the Cordillera de los Andes. Back to Spain, the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936 and Neruda's book of poems "Espana en el Corazon" deals with this theme.

Posted by Kim at 06:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Physics has proved what metaphysical religions have postulated for centuries, nay, millennia: that everything has energy, a life force, if you will, a universal vibration. In scientific terms (I'm going out on a limb here), the atomic structure, the electrons and protons, constantly moving. These things are better explained by students of quantum mechanics, but I remember this point being made in a humanities class I took some years back. It's stayed with me for obvious reasons.

In coming across an excerpt of an essay by John Burroughs, I was struck by this passage:

"It jars upon our sensibilities and disturbs our preconceived notions to be told that the spiritual has its roots in the carnal and is as truly its product as the flower is the product of the roots and the stalk of the plant. The conception does not cheapen or degrade the spiritual, it elevates the carnal, the material. To regard the soul and body as one, or to ascribe to consciousness a physiological origin, is not detracting from its divinity, it is rather conferring divinity upon the body." (This is much like Transcendentalism, whose proponents assembled their ideas from the great teachings of the Bhagavad Gita.)

He writes about how, "Every place is under the stars, every place is the centre of the world. Stand in your own dooryard and you have eight thousand miles of solid ground beneath you, and all the sidereal splendors overhead." (You can read the actual Atlantic article here.)

It's 1908, he's writing about Darwinism which, as we all know, is under attack, not unlike the Scopes Monkey Trial of the 1920s. Burroughs writes, optimistically, these advances in scientific thought bring us closer to understanding our natural selves, our place in Nature and the nature of, well, Nature. I pause for thought on this point because since the Enlightenment what as propelled our notion of progress (which I am immensely preoccupied with right now) is the scientific method, empirical observations, the ability to rationally replicate data across time and space. But this, too, is under attack today. We can see it in the Bush administrations questioning of global warming (David Reminick of The New Yorker has this this to say about that.)

Fukuyama (whose book End of History I make reference to like a maniac) says that science is the one true marker of progress because scientific finds are not "subject to human caprice." In the truest sense, he's right, but as we've come to see, determined politicians can negate the most solid of scientific theories. But Fukuyama's larger point is like Burroughs’: through science, we can intelligence that removes us from our ignorance of the past and if we subscribe to the idea of historical progression, that is an ignorance we will not lapse into again because we won’t lose that knowledge.

Fukuyama: "For if we look around at the entire range of human social endeavor, the only one that is by common consensus unequivocally cumulative and directional is modern natural science. The same cannot be said for activities like painting, poetry, music, or architecture....Natural science, the on the other hand, builds upon itself: there are certain 'facts' about nature that were hidden from the great Sir Isaac Newton, that are accessible to any undergraduate physics student today...."

But about the great catastrophes undermining our “civilized” underpinnings, causing mass food shortages, water shortages and destroying civil society? Won’t that knowledge be lost? Fukuyama says no, that some of us will retain that knowledge and small pockets of civilization will grow out of that. But the line between civilized and uncivilized is a tenuous one and maybe nuclear winter won’t completely destroy all vestiges of civilized society and maybe what would emerge from that would be better than what’s destroyed, but those basic impulses of human nature are not mitigated by the fallout of huge disasters.

I am still a pessimist it seems.

The connection I see is that both Fukuyama and Burroughs see science as a hallmark of human progress, a way deepening our understanding of ourselves, our uniqueness among animals and perhaps our small sliver of the univrse.

Posted by Dawn at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have to say that I am a bit addicted to the genre of memoir. I like to read it, and I like to write it, even when I am writing about other things. The one I'm reading now is The Little Locksmith, by Katharine Butler Hathaway. Her writing style is delicate, cultivated, and detailed without being tiresome. She describes the smallest things with a grace and personality that make you want to be your friend, even though she was living in the early part of the 20th century. Her life was simple - she spent much of it unmarrried, she didn't travel much, she wasn't extraordinarily rich. What makes you love her is her is her strength - she was very, very small, and had a hunched back. She couldn't move around a lot when she was very young and spent much of her time in bed reading. But she had a loving family and they never made her feel like she was anything but amazing. The problems came when she came in contact with people outside of this protected circle.

She realized after a while that she was different, and not in a way that other people saw as special or lucky, like her family made her feel. Her relationship with her sexuality is heartbreaking - she had all but given it up, thinking that that type of fulfillment was not one of the things that she would be able to experience. She accepted this renunciation, wrongly, but she couldn't avoid the desires. She would look at tall, pretty girls, not exactly with envy (because she was better, gentler than that), but with a type of admiration and fascination for the ease with which they glided through life. She had a friend who was 19 when she was 28, I think, and she was captured by her beauty. Soon this girl got married and sailed for Paris. It makes you wonder if Katharine didn't have the better deal - she got a chance to develop herself. She went to Radcliffe. She read and read and read. She suffered from what she thought she was missing from her life, but during this time she earned a great deal of depth for herself, which would serve her later on.
I love the way she talks about writing. She took it very seriously, to the point where she realized that others might not understand her dedication to her art. She allotted a certain amount of time to it every day and did not let life get in the way, if that's possible at all.
But the main premise of the book is the house that Hathaway bought for herself on the New England coast. She approached it with a bravery and a sense of adventure that I found pretty humbling. She had so much appreciation for the small things that she noticed in this new place, and as a writer I have a lot of appreciation for that. I can imagine her being like me, almost wanting to limit her experiences, simplify her life, so that she could have some hope of being able to record it all. But that, alas, is impossible. So much of our time and thoughts and perceptions will fade into the past, never having been communicated, as if telling someone could somehow keep them alive.

Posted by Kim at 07:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What intrigues me about the October essay I mention here is how the Jewish intellectual scene was taken aback by her book because it talked so openly about the Holocaust, something Rabinback writes most Jews didn't talk about in public.

But I think of our attitude now toward the Holocaust, the movies that are made, the books that are written, the cartoons and how one historian established his career on the idea the Holocaust didn't exist, and it's not sacred in the way it was when Arendt was writing about it. I guess when I say sacred I mean taboo, because genocide, mass slaughter, something uniquely 20th century, shouldn't be sacred.

It should be explained, it should be demystified. I know when I visited both Dachau and Auschwitz it was horrible because of what associations I made to the place, what I remembered from history class and what those places have come to mean in terms of progress and humanity. I shuddered in the snow because of how I imagined this place to be and I wondered if I were a Jew in that camp what would I have done? What would I have thought? I imagined the experience like how the movies portrayed them. I sometimes forget that's someone's interpretation.

And then it makes me think of history and how this fits into history if we're going on the assumption that history is progressive and linear and we are advancing toward something, then what does this mean.

"One might describe history as a dialogue between societies, in which those with grave internal contradictions fail and are succeeded by others that manage to overcome those contradictions." So write Fukuyama in The End of History and The Last Man. He's writing about Hegel's notion that history was dialectical, a conversation between two people who take different positions (I am putting this crudely) and that person with less self-contradictory point of view wins or a third view, free of those existing contradictions, forms and becomes the dominant point of view.

Interestingly, this idea surfaces in a New Yorker article about gay Episcopalian bishop, Gene Robinson. Author Peter Boyer writes, "In the current Anglican conflict, echoes can be heard of a larger struggle within Christianity that has been happening for more than a century." Among the impacts of Darwinism, advances in science (this notion of progress that through time and history, we learn to reveal more about the nature of ourselves and the universe), "the Hegelian dialectic shaped a new image of an immanent and impersonal God, an unknowable force whose will was worked through human progress."

Going back to Fukuyama, I drew this mental connection while reading that article at lunch, thinking of what Fukuyama writes: According to Hegel, "Christianity, in particular, was an ideology that grew out of slavery, and whose proclamation of universal equality served the interests of slaves in their own liberation." Our sense of history and sense of our progress is changed by our social conditions, by our surroundings and our inability to see things otherwise because we are a product of our social environments.

Fukuyama continues, "When Hegel declared that history had ended after the Battle of Jena in 1860" --have no idea about that battle -- "...he was saying that the principles of liberty and equality underlying the modern liberal state had been discovered and implemented in the most advanced countries, and that there were no alternative principles or forms of social and political organization that were superior to liberalism."

What does this have to do Robinson? I suppose I see the conflict in Anglican Church -- whose fault lines are drawn most prominently between the Western churches and the Southern churches in Africa -- as one of social conditions, that people will understand or internalize something like the appointment of a gay bishop based on what their larger culture and beliefs tell them. OK, some will see things differently no matter what, but this discussion, full of self-contradiction, will it resolve itself? Will a third way emerge that will heal the schism or are two radical points of view doomed to isolation and two separate churches? Can an African Episcopal bishop reconcile his evangelical views of Christianity with "liberal" views of the Western bishops or vice versa? Should maintaining unification be the ultimate goal?

Posted by Dawn at 08:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lilia Carillo (1930-1974) only lived to be 44. That's one of the first things I noticed about her when I was browsing through a book of Mexican art. I wondered whether she painted up until the last week or day, and whether it was sudden or slow or painful. The other thing I noticed was that her art is almost not representational but it kind of is, if you see what I mean. You can see some obvious shapes, but it's not as if there is a scene or a clear story being told.

I just found that this painting was something I wanted to stand and look at in order to see what it meant to me. It's sort of like a Kandinsky in that there are all these shapes leading to each other and all these possible ways of leading to them. I find her work to be very feminine, especially this one called Amor Floreciente (Blossoming Love), which is in my book. You can see a few forms that look like faces, but the act of blossoming is not in a kiss or in the act of sex; instead, it's in the way the colors lift the viewer's eye up to the top of the page. She seems like she was pretty unique among many painters who were doing highly symbolic work about social issues like labor and racism.

Posted by Kim at 06:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In Eichmann in New York: The New York Intellectuals and the Hannah Arendt Controversy by Anson Rabinback (OCTOBER 108, Spring 2004, pp. 97–111.), Rabinback has this to say about Arendt's account and the backlash of her work among New York Jewih intellectuals:

“In this regard, Arendt’s report, precisely because it did not sanctify the Holocaust, because it continued to warn of the vulnerability of the pariah, and because it so manifestly seemed to question the virtue of victimhood, gave offense, and not merely because of its intemperate judgments and irreverent tone. Her account simultaneously enabled and violated the terms of the newly emerging public perception of the Holocaust.”

Arendt is unforgivening in her examination of international justice at the Eichmann trial. She questions how the trail can in some ways be valid given that Eichmann was kidnapped by Israeli intelligence and brought to Jesrusalem without an extradiation agreement.

Rabinback continues:
“Before the Eichmann controversy, the New York intellectuals rarely addressed the Holocaust. If their manifestly Jewish origins did play a subliminal role in their disaffection from Stalinism in the late 1930s, or in the creation of “liberal anti-Communism” a decade later, there is no evidence that they were moved by a preoccupation with either anti-Semitism or the Holocaust.”

Moreover:
“In such events, ‘timing’ is often as important as substance, and the occasion is often less important than the public prohibitions that are violated and contested. Such events capture the public imagination at a moment when something larger is at stake in how public culture goes about redefning the prohibitions attached to certain emblematic experiences and ideas. The Eichmann controversy—in part because of the trial itself—was a watershed in the public uses and public acceptance of discussion of Holocaust memory, a memory previously restricted to a relatively small, and relatively unknown, coterie of scholars at the margin of the established disciples.”

Posted by Dawn at 10:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today I, the fearless explorer that I am, went to check out the Museo de Arte Moderno in the Bosque Chapultepec. I tried to take photos of the artworks themselves, but then I realized it was more practical and more interesting to look at people looking at the paintings, especially with the ones that always had people in front of them.

This is one of Frida Kahlo's great self-portraits. I liked how the mother and child were looking at it together, and the mother has her hand on her heart as she is speaking.

Here is a couple looking at the same painting. I like how the guys is kind of leaning back and to the side as he looks at it. Now I won't go into details, but it makes you think about personal experiences and men and how they are, and that's why I wonder what it's like for a couple to look at Frida. Probably the guy was totally cool and never would make the woman feel like he was pasted onto her forehead like Diego did to Frida, but you just don't know that looking at them. Nobody knows but them.

The experience of viewing the painting for a mother and a child must be a lot different for a mother and child than it is for a couple, at least my experience of watching them was different. I just wonder what a child would think, because there's something violent about the painting, as there is about a lot of Kahlo's works. It has her holding the hand of another version of herself, and you can see her heart inside her body, except it's actually on the outside - it shows the pain of having your body opened up physically and emotionally, too. The thing is that the girl seemed to get it, or to be interested anyway, and the fact that they were looking at it together made me think that this is a mom who is showing her daughter a lot of different facets of life.

For a couple, it's a whole different thing. Frida's relationship with Diego Rivera was intense but tortured, and you just wonder whether that is part of the painting and whether you can avoid thinking about that when you look at her work if your mind has already been polluted by historical context (I'm kidding, just in case you don't know me). When I went to the Palacio de Bellas Artes a couple of weeks ago and saw this amazing exhibition of the Mexican Muralists which is going to be there all year, I noticed in the bookstore some postcards of some self-portraits by Frida where there was a little bust of Diego on her forehead, like where you would put the third eye. Just coming out of an exhibition where his gigantic murals take up entire walls of an immense building, you feel like he was pasted right onto her brain and she couldn't get him out of there, as if he was a part of her, no matter how badly he hurt her.

Posted by Kim at 03:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hannah Arendt in Eichmann and Jerusalem calls evil banal. She questions the intelligence of Eichmann, who the prosecution claim was a mastermind behind the Final Solution, and even looks at his way of speaking as an indication that he is not only a dullard but too unimaginative, too perfectly suited to the bureaucracy to even truly understand what he was doing.

I think what I am looking for in asking these questions about historical pessimism is a look into the future. What does mean for us and those of us to come? (As I was telling my captive audience over dinner the other night (who is polite enough to listen and indulge my neurotic whims), reading all these books, or just reading in general, has rarely brought me closer to a final answer on anything but rather filled me a million more questions. That’s definitely one of the hardest lessons I’ve had to learn.

Arendt writes something, this one passage, in her book that struck me as a lesson of these crimes: “Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that ‘it could happen’ in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this to remain a place for human habitation.” (Arendt’s emphasis).

Maybe the most horrific acts of human violence are countered with the greatest acts of human courage and resilience. The fact that it doesn’t happen everywhere, that people do resist, that we do attempt to create and maintain international laws upholding the sanctity of human life, maybe that’s what’s to be taken from this. We see the most honorable part of ourselves when we feel we farthest from it.

But Arendt’s ideas were the subject of fierce character assassination for years after she published these articles in the The New Yorker. That leads me here.

Posted by Dawn at 09:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the first hings that I did when I came to Mexico City was to buy a few books. As much as I would like to say that I set out to find them, it would be more accurate to say that they found me. I was looking for an apartment, and on the way back to my hotel I noticed a little hole in the wall where used books were sold. There was a man with wire rimmed glasses and leathery skin behind the counter, which was little more than a plank across a corner of the store, where he sat surrounded on either side by towering stacks of dark, dusty books. There was history, there was art, there was travel, and of course there was literature. I told the man that I wanted to get to know Mexican literature while I was here, but I didn't know where to start. He gave me Los de abajo, by Mariano Azuela, and said "Start here."

I finished the book in a week or so, making my way through it as I sat on a couch in my hotel or waited for my food to arrive at a restaurant down the street. Sometimes people would look at it and say "Oh, Mariano Azuela," as if they were impressed, or else they would act like they wouldn't touch a book like that, and some didn't recognize it at all. Actually it's a pretty important book about the Mexican Revolution. It shows all the contradictions that went into it - the amazing idealism and the horrible failures that came as the revolutionaries turned into the people they were seeking to overthrow.
Some of the characters are brutal; they want power just like anyone else. The idea here would be that powerful armies are deadly because they can be, they have the right tools, not because their leaders are anymore bloodthirsty than indigenous people of the Americas or the Himalayas or whatever. We all have it inside of us. And revolution is always going to be tricky, especially if you have to use the tactics of your enemy to overthrow him. In that sense, in the sense that poor men started fighting an ended up slaughtering the peasants whose rights they claimed to want to defend, an aspect of the Mexican Revolution could be said to be repeating itself in the contemporary guerilla warfare in Latin America. Columbia is first in the world for kidnappings and its revolutionaries, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, are opposing the Colombian state in a decades-long civil war that continues to claim innocent victims and fund itself with the drug trade. So the revolution, the hope for the people, is in the end another part of what oppresses them through fear and violence.
Another interesting part of Los de abajo is its intellectual character, Luis Cervantes. First fighting with the government, he switches over when he realizes that the rebels are going to win. He uses his higher level of language, which Azuela makes very different from the common men he fights with, to dominate them. He talks swirls around them, confusing them into submission while actually saying very little. That is one of the paradoxes of language - it can help us to communicate, but it can also create the illusion of great ideas. Luis Cervantes was self-serving and unconvincingly idealistic - if he was such an advocate of the people, why wasn't he with them from the beginning?
This book was a good start for my journey through Mexican literature, but there's so much more. I'll try to look at how the literature fits into history because it's something I wasn't allowed to do in grad school - history takes us away from the pure substance of literature, which we must not dilute! I hope you agree with me that that is pure baloney.

Posted by Kim at 06:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I just think this is sculpture of Josephine Baker by Alexander Calder is amazing. Wires, lines in light, shadow and three dimensions.

Filed under Art

Posted by Dawn at 10:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's been a more than 10 years since the publication of End of History when, as the title suggests, the end of history was declared by Francis Fukuyama. OK, that’s not what he really declared but that’s what’s been written about the book and Fukuyama in all these long years since it debuted. I was really prompted to read this book after reading a review of Fukuyama’s latest book, which The New Yorker reviewer characterized as being an update, a critique if you will, of Fukuyama’s standing as a neo-conservative.

But that’s not what I’m writing about.

Maybe another day, but not today. I’ve started reading End of History and I was struck by his opening line, “The twentieth century, it is safe to say, has made all of us made into deep historical pessimists”, which followed this opening quote (an excerpt): “After these dreaded events [reference to Auschwitz], occurring in the heart of the modern, enlightened, technological world, can one still believe in the God who is necessary Progress any more than in the God who manifests His Powers in the form of super-intending Providence?” (Emile Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History).

This follows me wherever I go.

Fukuyama goes on to write that maybe the events of the 20th century don’t herald our inevitable destruction but that we ought to rethink our notions of progress. He says this problem (which I consider existential as well as political and philosophical) is “the crisis of twentieth-century politics, and the intellectual crisis of Western rationalism.” The 19th century, he says, was built on the idea that we’re progressing toward liberal democratic, which was possible at any time, any place (Mr. President, please take note). But are humans too flawed, too fragile, too weak to really think they could master their own fate? And if the experiment of liberal democracy fails, what will replace it?

Ronald Wright, whose book I referenced in a similar context, says that the problem maybe evolutionary: “Culture itself has created this uniquely human problem: partly because cultural growth runs far ahead of evolution, and because for a long time now the accreting mass of culture has forestalled natural selection and put destiny in our hands.”

Now, to be fair, I don’t want to seem like taking something grossly out of context (which I will be guilty of from time-to-time). Wright is talking about the experiment of civilization and what defines a civilization, his explanation makes me wonder: have we evolved culturally, intellectually so far beyond our more baser instincts that this clash between our high idealism and animal nature is all but inevitable? And what about all the organizations dedicated to advancing non-violence and pacifism? Misguided?

On Friday, I spent part of the day talking with people from Global Majority, which strives to do just that, and I would hardly qualify them as misguided. These were people who worked on the Northern Ireland peace process, post-apartheid activism in South Africa, conflict resolution in Rwanda and everything they said seemed to me absolutely right – who wouldn’t want peace and no war? But who can believe those things are possible after history, after the long shadow of Auschwitz? One person said something to me though that maybe does answer this question. After spending time talking to women sick with radiation poisoning the bombings of Hiroshima, he told me they were able to transcend the victim mentality, the us vs. them outlook, by coming to understand the “deep river” of human of nature from which comes violence.

Filed under Art, History, Philosophy, Politics

Posted by Dawn at 10:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

(Another picture from the National Gallery's DADA exhibit).

It seems to me Marcel Duchamp is one of the few artists of the 20th Century to really laugh. I think about what it would be like hanging out with him, urinal, dismantled bike in his studio, what he would say and do and think about.

He's creating this works around in the decades before WWII but he influences a generation of artists to find the grim absurdities with life (I think of Max Ernst here) and laugh.

Posted by Dawn at 09:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What I was alluding to yesterday with Reinhold Niebuhr is his book The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. I had never thought of WWII in terms of original sin and the implications it has had on human behavior throughout history. So Niebhur is writing this in 1944, when things in Europe are bad, to say the least (makes me think of Europe Central), and Neibuhr being a Protestant scholar and preacher, looks at what is engulfing Europe in terms of "universal good" and "universal law."

He defines "children of darkness" as "moral cynics, who know no law beyond their will and interest. "Children of light" are those "who believe self-interest should be brought under the discipline of a higher law..."

Within that framework he writes, "Our democratic civilization" (which Ronald Wright in A Short History of Progress explains is an experiment, like all civilization) "has been built, not by children of darkness but by foolish children of light. It has been under attack by children of darkness, by moral cynics, who declare that a strong nation need acknowledge no law beyond its strength….

“The children of darkness are evil because they know no law beyond the self.”

Niebuhr has serious misgivings with the Enlightenment (that is, of course, under the same sort of discussion today – the new Pope and the cult of relativism) when he writes, “modern culture represents the revolt of new thought, informed by modern science, against a culture in which religious authority had fixed premature and too narrow limits for the expansion of science…”

He continues: “Modern secularism is divided into many schools. But all various schools agreed in rejecting the Christian doctrine of original sin…. The confidence of modern secular idealism in the possibility of an easy resolution of the tension between individual and community, or between classes, races and nations is derived from a too optimistic view of human nature. This too generous estimate of human virtue is intimately related to an erroneous estimate of human nature.”

This view, he contends, gives rise to democracies where the individual is viewed as an essentially harmless and denies our animal capacity for violence, or in a spiritualized sense, our capacity for “evil.” Niebuhr goes on write to something I think Hannah Arendt tackled so well in Eichmann in Jerusalem (something I will get to soon): “Democratic theory … is just as stupid in analyzing the relation between the national and the international community as in seeking a too simple harmony between the individual and the national community.”

Arendt (whose book is the subject of an amazing essay in October, yeah I’m sure it’s that journal) questions the ability of international criminal courts to provide justice when someone has committed “crimes against humanity”, a term, a concept she also debates in her book. But does our capacity for violence on such a grand scale come from our denial of original sin and fallibility before God (a fixture in many monotheistic religions)? Our animal nature? Our belied in progressive science? I know Vonnegut has something to say about this…..I just don’t know what.

Posted by Dawn at 09:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

DADA. I took this photo at the National Gallery in Washington, DC, when I was there for a break in February. I have been sitting on this exhibit since, mentally anyway, and I’m bit embarrassed to admit it’s taken me two months to get around to talking about it. But DADA presents us with so many ideas about war, mechanization, progress, humanity, and it wasn’t until I saw the whole thing displayed – film clips, audio files of DADA poetry, the paintings, books and posters – that I realized DADA is political protest embracing the absurdity of our modern notion of progress drawn to its logical extreme (is our ability to perfect mass slaughter a sign we no longer believe we are fallible (in the Christian sense) and are we really progressing? What does it say about a species that, if nothing else, has become violent on a larger and larger scale as it has also made the greatest advances in sciences and the arts?) and the rebellion against war and fascism that crushed Europe in this time.

I have never read Nietzsche, but I know his ideas are critical to the philosophical underpinnings to much of the discourse arising in the interwar years (not to mention after). But walking through the exhibit, I was really reminded by Kurt Vonnegut and what he taught me about war, science and morality when I read his oeuvre in high school (OK, I haven’t read everything of his). Cats Cradle with ice nine and the perversity of family secrets – I never knew science in this way and Vonnegut asks what responsibilities scientists have to the discoveries they make the resulting consequences. But here is another idea, emerging before Vonnegut, but during the time of DADA (a definite influence on DADA’s cousin Surrealism): “the doctrine of the universal neurosis of mankind is the psychoanalytical analogue of the theological doctrine of original sin.” (Taken from Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History).

I want to jump next to Reinhold Niebuhr…

Posted by Dawn at 10:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As this blog evolves, our thinking and reasoning on our project will too. This is really about quantifying knowledge and I know I envision this blog as a the footnotes, in a way, to a larger book of ideas. OK, that's how I think about it now. But I'm bound to change my mind. Since this is very much about the workings of our brains, I'm posting a Q&A Kim and I did via email between March 7 and 13 when she was en route to Mexico and we were discussing what we'd like this blog to be. We did it with the intent of explaining to each other and others what this is all about. Enjoy!

Dawn: I see this as being our attempt to make sense of the world and the small parcel of it we inhabit. I suppose that could mean both exteriorly and interiorly, and maybe in the course of this we'll to what extent that's true. OK, that's a good start. What do you think about this? What kind of ground would you like to see us traverse?

Kim:
I see the project as having a couple of different functions, which, like you suggested, can be classified as exterior and interior. I would like to see us concretize as much as possible of the knowledge that we have acquired during our long years of education, and develop a greater ability to both enjoy the knowledge and to use it in the world. But I also see us working toward a product that other people can benefit from. If we create a text and a visual model of what we know, then people can get to know us and also enjoy one possible take on (primarily western) intellectual history.

Dawn:
Making solid our knowledge. I think that's the definitely the most difficult part of our task, especially since it's something rather nebulous. I see our text model taking shape on our blog and the visual to come later, especially after we've arranged our works discussed through time and space. But let us not be too serious. Why do you think this is worth doing?

Kim:
One of the reasons I think this is worth doing is simply to stay in touch, but it's also going to be a way for us to stay in touch with our pasts, with the times in our lives when we were lucky enough to be able to spend most of the day reading the books of some of the smartest people who ever walked the planet. I think the whole point of this is to remember what we've studied and try to make use of it as we revive our brain cells and keep them in shape.

Dawn:
Remembering is definitely the challenge, especially since memory's disposition is one of forgetfulness. But we should also have fun, especially in the company of the smartest people who've ever walked the planet. How should we have fun.

Kim:
Hmm, yes, fun. How could I forget that? For fun, we need to pretend that we are still working in adjacent cubicles and we need to set up some way to virtually send wisecracks across the thousands of miles that separate us. So this has to be a bit of a wisecracking blog.

Dawn:
lol -- imaginary cubicles -- genius! I think keeping that ethos of wisecracks and general chicanery is essential because otherwise we're (OK, I can only truly speak for myself) are boring. But this is really about just that: a conversation between two friends who have a lot on their mind. That's how these things get started, movements and the like, no?

Kim:
As I learned being your cubicle mate, wisecracks are the stuff of life. And since my new cubicle mate hasn't joked with me much yet, and I only speak with him in Spanish anyway, my hopes are slim that you will be replaced in person. I must keep my blog visions bright to fight this bleak reality. On a more serious note, I'm pretty excited about getting all my Spanish reading into our project. I am going to get deeply into Mexican Literature and it'll be cool to have an outlet for that.

Posted by Dawn at 09:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

About Me

When my plane touched down on the runway in Mexico City, I was writing in my notebook, trying to keep the pen moving in spite of all the forces of inertia that were moving my pen away from the paper and pushing my letters out of formation.

The last words that I wrote in that journal entry were “I think I’ll be happy here.”
I guess this offers a peek into a few things about me – I just moved to Mexico, I like to write, even in inconvenient situations, and I’m optimistic about my new life here. Incidentally, I’m also terrified of being kidnapped and my eyes sting and my lungs feel heavy from the pollution, and I occasionally drink coffee at dinner and stay up until 3 am, doing things like writing this paragraph.
Right now, I guess I would say my life is defined by flux – I am getting to know a new place with a mixture of enthusiasm and skepticism, and I’m practicing Spanish to my heart’s content, much of which consists of watching the Mexican equivalent of Nickelodeon.
So I would like to say that after a long journey, I’ve just landed in a spot that I feel comfortable with and which coincides with all my goals, and it’s taken a long time to find that. I think of the Episteme project as a way to collect all the ideas and the impressions that I’ve had over the past ten years (it’s a long time, but that’s when I started college!!) so that I can take a look back and ponder who I am, who other people are, and what we’re doing here. I hope that a side effect of it will be to help solidify who I am and how I want to live.
I know that I need all the best ideas in the world to help me with that, so that I can ultimately go beyond them and do my own thing, create my own paradigm of being, which will be completely original, wild, crazy, never seen before, and all for the good. It will be a recipe for the next segment of my life, and it will allow for improvisation but will set the tone for the times to come.

Posted by Kim at 05:09 PM | Permalink

I'm a journalist by profession and study. Now the study bit, well, I learned the most about journalism by being outside of class, but in all honesty, I consider myself a bedroom philosopher. I did my studies at San Francisco State University, perhaps the most wonderful city in the world, where I started to learn my life’s lessons. Lectures. Art. Bars. The best classrooms. And I had some amazing professors who indulged my whims.

I also credit my penchant for bedroom philosophizing from my year in Europe. There everyone likes to start dinner by asking, How do we reconcile our basic animal nature with our limitless intellectual capacity? Needless to say, I would sit there with my mouth agape and go home and lay in bed and wonder, How do we?

I often complain that I have too many problems because I read too much (I complain often, too). Reading too much means I ask too many questions and I’m slowly coming to the realizing that none will be answered in a way I find satisfying. But maybe some will be. But, reader, you know what? Just asking the questions I will be asking here is a relief in some way. It’s a relief because other people ask them too and in places other than the bedroom.

Posted by Dawn at 02:12 PM | Permalink

Episteme started, as such things do, when two friends start talking about things they like and they can't stop. We aren't academics, though we are found of the academy, but like to discuss all the things we learned through our many years at school and how we apply them in life.

It went something like this: Late last year, Kim was getting ready to take her final exam in literature and Dawn (who wasn’t) volunteered to steer Kim through hundreds of pages of notes she needed to know well to pass. It was a daunting task, sure, but Dawn, thinking she knows a little about everything, started asking questions (about tragedy and Hamlet) and those questions (about humanity’s basic paradox) led to more questions (what the hell does it all mean?) and yes, Kim did pass her test. But both had many questions left unresolved.

This blog is an attempt to quantify our knowledge but to do it in a way that's interesting and unassuming. We are not scholars, we don’t pretend to be, and we want people to help us by sharing their knowledge. And because we’re doing this from two different countries (Dawn in the United States; Kim in Mexico), we think the whole time/space aspect will make it rather interesting as well. So, what do you think?

For more, go here.

Posted by Dawn at 10:34 AM | Permalink