Wednesday May 21, 2008
So I’m an airplane. Flying, like, I do, inevitably to the Midwest. This is the longest time I’ve been away from the Midwest since my family first moved there in 1993. This is also, the longest time I’ve gone without seeing my father. It’s been almost a year. And while I’m excited to see my family and my father. I am in no way excited to be returning to the Midwest. It starts off with having to book a plane ticket there. Nobody lives in the Midwest. So, the bankrupt airlines that originally had their hub and spoke infrastructure set up to serve the whole country over, now charge an arm and leg to fly anywhere in their old network that isn’t on major thoroughfares. In addition, since they are probably continuing to lose money off these flights they are offering fewer than ever. That leaves the consumer/customer/citizen paying upwards of $500 dollars for a rountrip ticket with itineraries that include overnight layover in Chicago or Denver, or schedules that leave early in the morning and arrive late in the evening with minimal time in the air. This disgusts me. And so, there is an intensely bitter taste in my mouth before I’ve even made the first step toward visiting.
I know everyone bitches about airlines. But, I’m stuck on an airplane. So I’m going to bitch about it again. There is a good chance because of (I swear to God it’s not weather related) delays in Seattle, that I will miss my connection in Denver and of course, not be compensated for the fact that the airline (slash business I contracted with) didn’t deliver on its service. There is something fundamentally non-business like about this and why do we let them get away with it when it comes to air travel? Where else in the business world do we allow such leniency? I’m sorry, I’m a burgeoning broke corporation that can’t actually serve what we say we can. I mean. I realize I’m stuck, they are the only ones that fly where I need to go.
It just sometimes is too much. For example, I recall the time I flew United Airlines attempting to get from Seattle to Los Angeles on a budget. Surprisingly United had the cheapest flight. However, this flight flew me to Los Angeles from Seattle via Chicago. Now, I’m not sure if you all are that familiar with US geography, but Chicago is in Illinois, in the middle of the country, if anything, on the Eastern half of the country. Los Angeles is directly south of Seattle by some 1200 miles. They are both on the Western Seaboard. Out of control. Ridiculous.
I haven’t written in a while. I’m not sure why. Sometimes I feel like writing and other times I don’t. I didn’t really feel like writing now, but I’m bored and on the airplane. My iPod doesn’t have much battery and the book I brought (Aldous Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy) is aggravating. I’ve never reacted well to much Eastern Philosophy. I read Siddhartha (by Herman Hesse a German, writing on Indian religion) and enjoyed it thoroughly but as I’ve grown older the less and less I’ve been able to tolerate religious language. It’s a scary thing, witnessing yourself become less tolerant. I’m not sure what to think about it. Because certainly, I’ve bcome more tolerant in many other areas of my life. I think, perhaps, there’s too much of a fundamental difference between Eastern thought and my Western entrenchedness. There is a plethora of Western yuppies picking up Eastern philosophy as a smorgasboard of liberating ideas. But I reject that. I don’t like it. I know it’s not the original meaning intent or context of the ideas. Not that you could say our original Christian ideas are still in the same context, but there’s a continuity of cultural expression and thought throughout the West as Christian. So, since I haven’t spent any time in the East, I don’t know Pali, Sanskirt, Mandarin, Cantonese or even Arabic I am pretty much completely ill-disposed to tackle any of the Eastern ideas with any sincerity. And so, I don’t enjoy reading them. I can’t shake the language/cultural barrier. It’s ever present and I never feel like I’m accessing the ideas. It just all sounds silly to me. I think those that genuinely attempt to cross over, those who live in one and become fluent in the other still fail to successfully bridge the East with the West. It brings a new depth to foreign.
So I couldn’t read the book. It’s driving me nuts. So here I am, writing and complaining about Eastern Philosophy and airlines.
But, I’m trying to make an effort to sound positive. The thing is I simply don’t know how to discuss things I like or feel good about. I know I’ve written this before, this sort of enjoyment of the good stuff and a writing of the bad stuff. It is one-sided. I do love to fly though. I do. I secretly love all the crap that goes alone with it but I also love being in the air. I love touring a world made of a cloud floor and endless domes of blue. The clouds forming such a flat even floor as if I really could walk along them admiring the sunset like on the edge of land and ocean. Yeah. I like being in places like that. In the shadow tradition I believe one of my professors spoke about in his class Art of Living these places would be called crossroads. A twilight. And I do enjoy dwelling there. On the end of land and sea, on the edge of earth and sky, up here with the clouds. To drive the point home, dawn and dusk are the best times to be at those places. A favorite Pomona-ism that normally deals with racial identity applies here to and because I’m a fan of buzzwords, I’ll use it. Betwixt and between. One is betwixt and between at the crossroads. But the other aspect of crossroads that I enjoy is that they are often extremely dangerous places. They are the seat of the unknown. Highway robbers used to hide at crossroads, the edge of land and sea can be dangerous, certainly flying in this tin can so many thousands of feet above anything remotely solid is dangerous. One never knows what one might encounter at a crossroads. It as at the crossroads where we encounter new different and foreign things, none of them promising safety. It’s where trading is down, the intermingling of cultures, at the edge of one thing and the precipice of another. Betwist and between in a crossroads of twilight between day and night. In fact, Huxley was talking about this in a way. A crossroads naturally involves at least two paths, two roads, that cross. Huxley was pointing out the linguistic origins of the word two. Two has a negative connotation. It’s something dangerous and distracting and undesirable. No wonder this concept of the crossroads etc etc could be classified as a shadow tradition (I love it when these large motifs that I learn about separately turn out to be interrelated.) Two is subversive.
I like this. I like subversion. One, universal, united are these all the words that describe the Perennial Philosophy? What Huxley is tracing, through all the religious traditions. The Godhead, the Tao, the Buddha-womb. Unity, universality, a singlurality essence. Two, two, is negative, two is daemon, two is the devil, two is subversion. And there, lo and behold, you have a shadow tradition of the crossroads, but there you also have the basis of ethics for some of the Continental Philosophers. TWO. The basic structure of Otherness for Levinas. If I’m off on that stuff, I expect to be corrected by my knowledgable readers. But what subversion then! What devil worshippers, to give value and prominence to the two, the multiple. I like it. I think it grooves. It what I thought was so mindblowing about Catherine Keller’s work in Face of the Deep her incessant push toward reasserting a dualistic nature to the Christian Godhead, relentlessly reworking the texts and images and motifs of Christianity to remind, reveal, reinvent the duality of God, Elohim and Tehom. The two aspects of God. I can’t say I’m knowledge enough about the Eastern Philosophies, but I suppose I should look more into how the concepts of yin and yang work into the greater metaphysical worlds. Certainly yin is characteristically male and yang characteristically female. But its those two motifs, of the different genders that fundamentally reflect OUR duality. Why would our gods be One? But, if two is bad, and we have both male and female, well then one must be bad? Right? Women? Right? They are devilish right? In fact, let’s get rid of them completely from our Godhead, godhead is One and is Male.
This clashes with my post earlier about androgyny and fashion. That would be more the unification, the indffirence of gender. But perhaps its in the appeal. Because hermaphroditity doesn’t appeal to me either. But perhaps because I feel like it is self defeating to me as an intellectual concept. Because the whole point is that it’s a duality. But the hermaphrodite seems to even subvert the duality in a way that it combines the duality into one. The hermaphrodite is also something found at a crossroads. I think the yin and yang probably is a better model. Like I said, I’ll have to look into that further.
Well so there you go. That was a vomit.
Gosh, my brain is so out of shape. I would like to go back to school. Soon preferably. Thankfully, I’m flying to Iowa and will have nothing to do and half or is it all, of my library is in storage there. So I’ll have plenty of good reading. Gosh, it’s been so depressing being separated from my library. It’s just sometimes, moving a ton of books all around can be a headache. I can’t wait to get an apartment of my own. To move in. To get bookshelves galore. And, I’ve tried to lay claim to an old carpet rug rolled up in our basement that was my great-grandmother’s. I detest this modern furniture style etc. Gimme Victorian/Edwardian etc. There were these two old antique chairs in the house of one of my good friends. Her mother loved the chairs but rarely sat in them. The rest of the family was either indifferent or disapproved of the chairs present in the living room. Nobody ever sat in them and they all swore they were the most uncomfortable chairs in the world. I loved the chairs and every time I went over I would try to advocate on their behalf for their status as prominent living room pieces. I ALWAYS sat in them. Because, contrary to the popular opinion they were sooo comfortable. Perfect with the wide welcoming bowing arms and cushion slanted forward with a corona around the head rest that radiated with importance the one who could delicately seat themselves there. It was a chair with dignity. Not these abused, neglected, tortured and stripped refugees of furniture that you see standing on hardwood floors on dainty spindling legs and broad sweeping lines that are reminiscent of a distended belly or scoliosis. These malformations of modern furniture.
Ah! And it’ll be summery in Iowa now. Yes, I see this turning around. In the house of my father I can live well. I can splurges on wines and cheese, artisanal bread and all sorts of decadence. The sun room with some olive oil and my books. Perhaps it won’t be so bad after all…
Wow, sorry. That was ridiculous. P.S. I still love Yelle. Hasn’t gotten old yet. Maybe I’ll post a picture of those chairs, seeing as I’m going back to Iowa. Where they are. I also can’t wait to scope out my old coffeehouse haunt. I’m not sure I’ve spoken about it on here before. But it’s fantastic. Deep dark walls, deep dark furniture (at least it used to be) and often sweet classical music. Large ceramic bowls. Lawyer desk/library lamps. I like it. Hmm. Perhaps I could get excited about going back to the Midwest. If only for 10 days.
Well, we’re beginning our descent. Descent into the Mile High city. Descending indeed.
Monday, May 26, 2008
Fly Over Country.
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I hope you see this before like, next year. I thought the whole point of our education was to learn how to think beyond dualities. But maybe it’s not so much dualities per se that are the problem, but which dualities are chosen. Except I’m afraid two can become the new one, where dualisms become just as reductive as the notion of unity because they end up operating in much the same way. If a major problem with unification is that it presupposes harmony/consensus/homogeneity, can we imagine how a duality could become so ingrained/static as to preclude the entry of a third/fourth etc party, thus forming a unity in and of itself. Then of course the whole twilight-idea is about creating tensions and breaking solipsistic surfaces – but maybe “plurality” is a better metaphor than the number two (although I haven’t read Huxley and he might change my mind). Let’s say two OR MORE roads meet. Didn’t the crossroads involve a child as well? And a definite change in the meeting pair? And doesn’t that dualism then subvert …itself? As in, A and B meet but in the process they become A2 and B2 and thus no longer represent the “poles” they came from? Even if an ethical encounter is dualistic in practice in the sense that we define it in terms of Self meeting Other, it doesn’t presuppose that the universe is founded on some dualistic principle (or does it).
ReplyDeleteIt’s funny you would point to androgyny as the antithesis of dualisms because that concept (not the described phenomenon) has been opposed on the grounds that it reinforces rather than problematizes a rigid divide between feminine and masculine (just check the etymology). We talk about androgyny as though it’s a question of adding equal amounts of A to B (or F to M) and can’t seem to see it as just plain C. Meanwhile, the androgyny-TREND is criticized for undermining natural, laudable gender differences. Sexual difference-feminists (separate but equal) and liberal feminists (women equal to men) would disagree on this point, but seeing the ‘choice’ between unity and duality excludes the possibility of distinct gender identities beyond just male and female. That is not the same as saying we’re all the same or classifying each identity based on how much femaleness vs maleness it contains, but recognizing a non-homogenous plurality of alternatives that just ARE without reference to two primordial principles. In an attempt to do away with all power differentiation among women, lesbian feminists in the 70s vehemently rejected butch-femme identities as replicas of male-female pairings. A dualistic framework can’t account for plurality and so it resorts to mislabeling: if the plurality can be accommodated using ‘primordial’ terms, it will be labeled ‘same’ (butch-femme = male-female), and if it can’t, it’s labeled abnormal/pathological (hermaphroditism). Regardless of what “appeals” to you, this more or less practical problem should be obvious.
If you can get a hold of it, read Bruno Latour’s article “one more turn after the social turn”. It’s mostly about social studies of science, but brings a lot more interesting issues to the table. He’s arguing that modernism never existed because there never was a definite divide between Kant’s Transcendental ego and Things-in-themselves and therefore there can never be a ‘meeting point’ between the two. He’s saying that the subject and object don’t exist as purified forms, but are consequences of an event, and that in his non-Modern Constitution (he’s anti-modernism and anti-postmodernism), “everything interesting begins at what is no longer a meeting point but the origin of reality”. (I guess that might correspond to seeing androgyny as a “C” that produces A and B). isn’t this what people mean when they say that subjectivity is relational? That it’s produced through the event where individuals (not yet defined) mix? Of course, Latour seems to admit to the existence of an A and a B after the fact. So there actually IS a ‘two’ of some sort. What I’m wondering is to what degree this twoness is a universal fact(or perhaps contingent fact in nature on earth), or just some heuristic device we use as humans to cope with the messiness of the world.
But then, is it really that messy? If nature made us capable of/prone to binary-seeing/thinking, maybe nature itself does something similar. I don’t know if you’ve read anything on ‘natural kinds’ by Quine, but he has this article where he’s proposing a teleological model of scientific development that seems to culminate in something like the unity you’re criticizing.Quine doesn’t talk about two-ness specifically, only about categories based on similarity, “kinds” and how our need to rigidly define these is a “primitive” mark of science because ALL animals use divisions for inductive purposes, they simplify the world to survive. A mark of scientific maturity, on the other hand, is the “sloughing off” of this animal heritage in favor of general understandings of mechanisms, dynamics – a complete transcendence of categories and presumably therefore, also of dualisms. That sounds all very nice and postmodernish, except I’m not sure I want to preclude all notions of ‘natural categories’ (dualisms are another matter).
I think it’s Canguilhem who talks about nature’s innate divisions between life and death, healthy and pathological, (normal and abnormal?) and I know this point has been developed by Foucault. So even if we grant that physics and chemistry are big blobs that humans just happen to have made sense of using Quine’s theoretical vs primitive modes of thinking, isn’t the study of biology bound to be ‘categorical’ in the sense of adhering to more or less fixed/fluid divisions made by nature itself? A physicist or chemist need not worry about the central questions of the organic world, who lives, who dies, and why (what criteria determine the further developments of life?). A biologist does because there’s some sort of order in the subject matter she/he (binary again) is studying, and it seems that the categories we operate with must be similar in some substantial sense to nature’s own. It would intuitively seem like dualities would have a place in this scheme too, although probably not in the way we’re used to thinking about them. All the action is in the interplay and disturbances of these categories (if they exist, if 'categories' is even a proper word for ‘this’). Evolution occurs when some mechanism strays just far enough away from the norm (the healthy, the living) to challenge the natural status quo, and yet stays clear of total pathology (death). (But of course whether a mutation is favorable or not depends not on its ‘essense’ but on whether it will enhance/hinder adaptation to the environment. )
Is nature actually binary, or is the difference between day and night just to be seen as one of degree – a little lighter here, a little darker there – and then what becomes of twilight and inbetweenness if there’s nothing to be between. Certainly most organisms act as though sunlight vs no sunlight is an actual and important distinction determining action/inaction (photosynthesis, for one). But does acting (and for us, thinking) ‘as though’ make it real? Is TWO real? I know embarrassingly little about the number itself, its role in math etc, but there does seem to be something very special about it. And yet, as I mentioned earlier, I prefer the word “plurality”because it never closes on itself, the way even a Self and an Other can become a larger self and thus a self-referencing unity which is just what I think we’re trying to avoid with the ‘two’.
That said, I’m a big fan of Eastern approaches to medicine. How do you feel about mind-body/matter-dualisms? I surprised myself by defending physicalism on a recent exam. ‘two’ is, on the one hand, too many, and on the other hand, not many enough. How is that for subversion. I can’t deal with this anymore.