I think I might have written a book? I also wrote a song called "Let's Get Married for Tax Purposes" and furthermore I recorded an old song called "Who Needs You, Darling?" which I'm having trouble uploading but anyway you've probably heard it.
Happy Winter Solstice! Everything is great.
Oh, my corazon!
எழுதுகிறது பெரிதல்ல, இன்னும் அறிந்து சேர்க்கிறது பெரிது.
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Saturday, July 02, 2011
Half ventured is boldly won --
July 1st being the 182nd day of the year, we are now halfway through the Year of Ram. I thought maybe this was a good time to take stock and, since I never talk to anyone because I’m a misanthropic hermit, give my friends an update on where I am in life. My blog automatically updates to Facebook, which I recently learned means that anyone at all ever reads it, which is different from both the past and my expectations. So, you know. Here are answers to some of the most obvious questions, starting with what I think is most important.
Q. Did you shave your pubic hair?
A. I did, I really did. I still don’t know what all the fuss is about. It wasn’t a big deal. I don’t think I’ll do it again.
Q. Why is it the Year of Ram, exactly?
A. Because I’m tired of knowing how things will turn out, viz. badly. Because at the beginning of this year, I achieved a number of things I wanted ten years ago, and that made me wonder if maybe I’m not as terrible as I thought. Because I wondered if maybe it’s possible to succeed in this terrible world.
Q. Didn’t you once think you would die at twenty-seven?
A. I still might: September’s still a ways off, and no one can predict fate. But twenty-seven is a pretty rock and roll age to die, and there’s a lot more in my life now besides rock and roll.
Q. For example?
A. Prose, poetry, languages, travel, symbolism, education, knowledge, the Lord.
Q. Weren’t all those things in your life before?
A. Yes, intensely; but to be an artist, you have to be inside of your art all the time. For a period of my life, everything I knew or thought or did came to me through music as light moves through the luminiferous ether.
Q. So have you written any songs recently?
A. I have, I really have. I wrote two in the last month. They are called “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Cockroach” and “Bat House.” I think they’re okay. (N.B., if you’re reading this on Facebook I think that means you won’t see those as links. I recommend visiting http://lovesolveseverything.blogspot.com/2011/07/half-ventured-is-boldly-won.html if you want to hear a couple of songs about animals.)
Q. What about that book? Weren’t you writing a book?
A. I was. I still am. I expect to finish it and revise it a few times during the course of the Year of Ram. If you told me when I started that you wanted to read it, and I haven’t sent you anything, it’s probably only because I want to wait a minute and send you everything together.
Q. What are you going to do when you’re done? Are you going to just sit on it and move on with your life like you did with your last two novels?
A. I am not going to do that. I am going to make some effort to get it published. If you or anyone you know can help with that and thinks twelve thousand-odd rhymed lines of iambic pentameter about a fat Indian Jesuit looking for a huge bird sounds like a good time, please let me know.
Q. So do you want to be a writer, then?
A. Rephrase the question.
Q. What do you want to be when you grow up?
A. No, I still don’t like that. It makes certain assumptions that I don’t agree with.
Q. What do you want to be if you grow up?
A. I’ve gotten this question a lot, and the answer is always different. True answers I’ve given in the past include, but are not limited to: an astronaut, Chico Marx, wise, dead, naked, Childe Harold, smart, well-read, Diogenes the Cynic, a musician, Joseph Campbell, cool, a novelist, an itinerant preacher, a literature professor, a legend, a favorite uncle, a mystic, a hesychast, a hermit, a saint, a sage, an omphaloskeptic, an ascetic, a prophet, a rock and roll philosopher, a tzaddik in peltz, and a psychonaut.
Q. So what are you doing now?
A. I’m still teaching. I teach English, science, Western music, and drama.
Q. Where?
A. In a village called Anaikatti, outside of Coimbatore, in Tamil Nadu, India – the same state in which my parents were born. It’s a small village set among gorgeous rolling green hills. My best friends here are three mama cows, two baby cows, and a dog named Jimmy.
Q. Why are you there?
A. That’s a more complicated question than it appears to be, and I never have a good answer for it because the true answer is one that I don’t usually like to share with people. In a nutshell, it’s this: when I was young, the only course of life that appealed to me was that of a swami in orange robes. So I imagined that as soon as I was old enough to control my own destiny, I would go to India, find a guru, and spend the rest of my life based here.
Q. So you wanted to renounce the world?
A. Well, at the time, the only swamis I’d ever met were the ones associated with some organization, because otherwise it’s difficult to go to the United States. I didn’t really think about asceticism or anything like that; I was thinking about these people whose whole job is to travel around and educate people about religion, spirituality, and philosophy. It should be clear why that appealed to me.
Q. So why did you change your mind?
A. I only kind of changed my mind. But the real issue was that I went to college and started playing rock and roll, kissing girls, and reading Ulysses. And the rest, as Stephen Dedalus would say, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. But somehow I never lost the idea that there would come a point in my life, when I had finished all my journeys and adventures, when I would go to India and not leave again until I was enlightened, if then.
Q. So do you still want to renounce?
A. See, that’s where it gets complicated. The basic issue is this: on the one hand, I see every achievement possible in this world as a fleeting, ephemeral, and ultimately worthless confection of spun sugar, and all the pleasures of Earth seem shallow and pointless to me; on the other hand, everyone else seems to be having a pretty good time, so maybe I should just try more fun things. And then, on the third hand, I really like reading and writing and those kinds of intellectual or aesthetic enjoyments.
Q. So did you come to India only for spiritual reasons?
A. No, there was one other huge worldly reason as well, which is Tamil. I am now pretty well versed in a whole mess of different languages (of which some I can converse in, while some I can only read, but read decently well), but I have a lot of trouble with my mother tongue, which I spoke before I could speak English. This is a source of shame to me, and has been my whole life. I have always wanted to improve my Tamil enough that, if nothing else, I can read the works of my grandfather, who was a somewhat famous writer.
Q. How’s that going?
A. Briefly: not so well. After six months here – and, lest we forget, twenty-seven years of speaking and hearing the language before that – I still can’t open my mouth without the people around me complaining that my Tamil is so bad. Compare this to Japanese and Thai, of which I knew nothing before I arrived in those countries, and in which I could carry on a reasonable conversation after six months.
Q. Are you giving up?
A. Part of me wants to, but that’s not what the Year of Ram is about. It’s about persevering and getting shit done. It’s about Taking Care of Bidness. One thing that would help would be getting out of the village and going to a city, where I could find some kind of Tamil class or something. I spent a month in Madurai during the summer holidays, and my Tamil improved more in that one month than it did in the preceding four. And since I got back to school, I’ve lost all of those improvements in a matter of weeks.
Q. What other cool stuff have you done in India?
A. I visited the village where my grandfather the writer was born, and while there I talked to a bunch of people who knew and admired him and talked to me at length. I went to Delhi to participate in a puppet workshop. I visited the temple of my family god. I went to a few classical concerts and dance performances. I attended some lectures at the local ashram (all in Tamil, but I was able to follow). I saw a whole mess of historical temples and other sites. I joined in with local tribal dances. I made friends with some elephants and cows. I was bitten by a tremendous number of mosquitoes. I darkened pleasantly in the sun.
Q. How’s the food?
A. Everything I dreamed and more. When I was young, I ate South Indian food through a glass, darkly: imported frozen vegetables, close-but-not-quite spices, slightly altered snacks, and so on. My mother is a great cook, but she was working with different ingredients. Here I eat the food as it was always meant to be. There’s a garden in the school, and all my favorite vegetables that you can’t get in the States I can get straight off the tree or bush or vine here. One thing I miss is my mother’s rasam, because no one makes rasam like my mother does.
Q. How is your job?
A. It’s pretty great. The kids are a lot of fun, and we get an amazing amount of freedom to do what we want in class. The headmistress is a huge supporter of the arts, and anything creative we can do with the children is heartily encouraged. Which is obviously a big advantage for me.
Q. Are you going to stay?
A. I’m not sure. For one thing, there’s the need to go into the city I mentioned before. For another, the way that no one will accept me as Indian wears on me and makes me want to go to some country that isn’t America or India.
Q. Like where?
A. Somewhere with a language I like. Italy, Ireland, Taiwan, Greece, Indonesia, North Africa, and northern South America come to mind.
Q. If you went to those places, would you teach?
A. Secretly, I’ve kind of always hated teaching. (It’s a secret – don’t tell anyone.) I always assumed that it was because I wasn’t good at it yet, and that when I got better, I’d stop having this feeling of dread before every class and this sweeping relief at the moment when every lesson ends. Now I’m not so sure. I think maybe I have the same problem as the aforementioned Stephen Dedalus:
–I foresee, Mr Deasy said, that you will not remain here very long at this work. You were not born to be a teacher, I think. Perhaps I am wrong.
–A learner rather, Stephen said.
Q. And here what will you learn more?
A. We will see. Possibly much, and possibly very little. I’m definitely finishing this school year. Next April, I’ll reevaluate the situation.
Q. What do you want?
A. Deep down, underneath all my desires, only two things: to be free, and to feel like I’m worthwhile.
Q. What do you believe?
A. I believe in the Father almighty, creator of Heaven and Earth, and His only begotten son, Christ, Who is born in every soul in every moment but is seen only by those who have cleared their vision by means of love. I believe that there is no such thing as useless knowledge. I believe that most, if not all, problems can be solved by working with the way of things rather than against it. I believe that any act can only be completely effective when performed without attachment or desire. I believe that the universe is the way God looks when viewed through the prism of time, space, and causality. I believe that the world as we know it is the interference pattern caused by the intersection of matter/energy and consciousness. I believe that even the most profound mystical speculation can be known and proved or disproved. I believe that nothing is difficult when one truly understands oneself. I believe that I am destined for greatness, even if that does not include anyone recognizing my greatness. I believe that religion is mostly a load of shit, but that its symbolism and ritual can be useful to one who wants to know the Truth. I believe that the vast majority of activity of the vast majority of people is useless service to an arbitrary system of meaningless and artificial laws, and that to let myself be bound by that system would be paralyzing and soul-crushing. I believe that everything is sacred. I believe that the sum of human knowledge is close to nothing.
Q. So?
A. So I’ll keep doing what I’ve been doing: learning everything I can, refusing to do anything without what I consider a decent reason, and creating interesting and beautiful things. I’m never going to have what other people would call a career, because I’ll never be able to see the point. And I’ll never settle down, because settling down feels to me like a prison. All I know how to do is to keep being what I am. And, ultimately, that’s what I’ve learned in the first half of the Year of Ram: how to just kind of be what I am. It’s not easy, but I’m getting there.
Q. Did you shave your pubic hair?
A. I did, I really did. I still don’t know what all the fuss is about. It wasn’t a big deal. I don’t think I’ll do it again.
Q. Why is it the Year of Ram, exactly?
A. Because I’m tired of knowing how things will turn out, viz. badly. Because at the beginning of this year, I achieved a number of things I wanted ten years ago, and that made me wonder if maybe I’m not as terrible as I thought. Because I wondered if maybe it’s possible to succeed in this terrible world.
Q. Didn’t you once think you would die at twenty-seven?
A. I still might: September’s still a ways off, and no one can predict fate. But twenty-seven is a pretty rock and roll age to die, and there’s a lot more in my life now besides rock and roll.
Q. For example?
A. Prose, poetry, languages, travel, symbolism, education, knowledge, the Lord.
Q. Weren’t all those things in your life before?
A. Yes, intensely; but to be an artist, you have to be inside of your art all the time. For a period of my life, everything I knew or thought or did came to me through music as light moves through the luminiferous ether.
Q. So have you written any songs recently?
A. I have, I really have. I wrote two in the last month. They are called “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Cockroach” and “Bat House.” I think they’re okay. (N.B., if you’re reading this on Facebook I think that means you won’t see those as links. I recommend visiting http://lovesolveseverything.blogspot.com/2011/07/half-ventured-is-boldly-won.html if you want to hear a couple of songs about animals.)
Q. What about that book? Weren’t you writing a book?
A. I was. I still am. I expect to finish it and revise it a few times during the course of the Year of Ram. If you told me when I started that you wanted to read it, and I haven’t sent you anything, it’s probably only because I want to wait a minute and send you everything together.
Q. What are you going to do when you’re done? Are you going to just sit on it and move on with your life like you did with your last two novels?
A. I am not going to do that. I am going to make some effort to get it published. If you or anyone you know can help with that and thinks twelve thousand-odd rhymed lines of iambic pentameter about a fat Indian Jesuit looking for a huge bird sounds like a good time, please let me know.
Q. So do you want to be a writer, then?
A. Rephrase the question.
Q. What do you want to be when you grow up?
A. No, I still don’t like that. It makes certain assumptions that I don’t agree with.
Q. What do you want to be if you grow up?
A. I’ve gotten this question a lot, and the answer is always different. True answers I’ve given in the past include, but are not limited to: an astronaut, Chico Marx, wise, dead, naked, Childe Harold, smart, well-read, Diogenes the Cynic, a musician, Joseph Campbell, cool, a novelist, an itinerant preacher, a literature professor, a legend, a favorite uncle, a mystic, a hesychast, a hermit, a saint, a sage, an omphaloskeptic, an ascetic, a prophet, a rock and roll philosopher, a tzaddik in peltz, and a psychonaut.
Q. So what are you doing now?
A. I’m still teaching. I teach English, science, Western music, and drama.
Q. Where?
A. In a village called Anaikatti, outside of Coimbatore, in Tamil Nadu, India – the same state in which my parents were born. It’s a small village set among gorgeous rolling green hills. My best friends here are three mama cows, two baby cows, and a dog named Jimmy.
Q. Why are you there?
A. That’s a more complicated question than it appears to be, and I never have a good answer for it because the true answer is one that I don’t usually like to share with people. In a nutshell, it’s this: when I was young, the only course of life that appealed to me was that of a swami in orange robes. So I imagined that as soon as I was old enough to control my own destiny, I would go to India, find a guru, and spend the rest of my life based here.
Q. So you wanted to renounce the world?
A. Well, at the time, the only swamis I’d ever met were the ones associated with some organization, because otherwise it’s difficult to go to the United States. I didn’t really think about asceticism or anything like that; I was thinking about these people whose whole job is to travel around and educate people about religion, spirituality, and philosophy. It should be clear why that appealed to me.
Q. So why did you change your mind?
A. I only kind of changed my mind. But the real issue was that I went to college and started playing rock and roll, kissing girls, and reading Ulysses. And the rest, as Stephen Dedalus would say, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. But somehow I never lost the idea that there would come a point in my life, when I had finished all my journeys and adventures, when I would go to India and not leave again until I was enlightened, if then.
Q. So do you still want to renounce?
A. See, that’s where it gets complicated. The basic issue is this: on the one hand, I see every achievement possible in this world as a fleeting, ephemeral, and ultimately worthless confection of spun sugar, and all the pleasures of Earth seem shallow and pointless to me; on the other hand, everyone else seems to be having a pretty good time, so maybe I should just try more fun things. And then, on the third hand, I really like reading and writing and those kinds of intellectual or aesthetic enjoyments.
Q. So did you come to India only for spiritual reasons?
A. No, there was one other huge worldly reason as well, which is Tamil. I am now pretty well versed in a whole mess of different languages (of which some I can converse in, while some I can only read, but read decently well), but I have a lot of trouble with my mother tongue, which I spoke before I could speak English. This is a source of shame to me, and has been my whole life. I have always wanted to improve my Tamil enough that, if nothing else, I can read the works of my grandfather, who was a somewhat famous writer.
Q. How’s that going?
A. Briefly: not so well. After six months here – and, lest we forget, twenty-seven years of speaking and hearing the language before that – I still can’t open my mouth without the people around me complaining that my Tamil is so bad. Compare this to Japanese and Thai, of which I knew nothing before I arrived in those countries, and in which I could carry on a reasonable conversation after six months.
Q. Are you giving up?
A. Part of me wants to, but that’s not what the Year of Ram is about. It’s about persevering and getting shit done. It’s about Taking Care of Bidness. One thing that would help would be getting out of the village and going to a city, where I could find some kind of Tamil class or something. I spent a month in Madurai during the summer holidays, and my Tamil improved more in that one month than it did in the preceding four. And since I got back to school, I’ve lost all of those improvements in a matter of weeks.
Q. What other cool stuff have you done in India?
A. I visited the village where my grandfather the writer was born, and while there I talked to a bunch of people who knew and admired him and talked to me at length. I went to Delhi to participate in a puppet workshop. I visited the temple of my family god. I went to a few classical concerts and dance performances. I attended some lectures at the local ashram (all in Tamil, but I was able to follow). I saw a whole mess of historical temples and other sites. I joined in with local tribal dances. I made friends with some elephants and cows. I was bitten by a tremendous number of mosquitoes. I darkened pleasantly in the sun.
Q. How’s the food?
A. Everything I dreamed and more. When I was young, I ate South Indian food through a glass, darkly: imported frozen vegetables, close-but-not-quite spices, slightly altered snacks, and so on. My mother is a great cook, but she was working with different ingredients. Here I eat the food as it was always meant to be. There’s a garden in the school, and all my favorite vegetables that you can’t get in the States I can get straight off the tree or bush or vine here. One thing I miss is my mother’s rasam, because no one makes rasam like my mother does.
Q. How is your job?
A. It’s pretty great. The kids are a lot of fun, and we get an amazing amount of freedom to do what we want in class. The headmistress is a huge supporter of the arts, and anything creative we can do with the children is heartily encouraged. Which is obviously a big advantage for me.
Q. Are you going to stay?
A. I’m not sure. For one thing, there’s the need to go into the city I mentioned before. For another, the way that no one will accept me as Indian wears on me and makes me want to go to some country that isn’t America or India.
Q. Like where?
A. Somewhere with a language I like. Italy, Ireland, Taiwan, Greece, Indonesia, North Africa, and northern South America come to mind.
Q. If you went to those places, would you teach?
A. Secretly, I’ve kind of always hated teaching. (It’s a secret – don’t tell anyone.) I always assumed that it was because I wasn’t good at it yet, and that when I got better, I’d stop having this feeling of dread before every class and this sweeping relief at the moment when every lesson ends. Now I’m not so sure. I think maybe I have the same problem as the aforementioned Stephen Dedalus:
–I foresee, Mr Deasy said, that you will not remain here very long at this work. You were not born to be a teacher, I think. Perhaps I am wrong.
–A learner rather, Stephen said.
Q. And here what will you learn more?
A. We will see. Possibly much, and possibly very little. I’m definitely finishing this school year. Next April, I’ll reevaluate the situation.
Q. What do you want?
A. Deep down, underneath all my desires, only two things: to be free, and to feel like I’m worthwhile.
Q. What do you believe?
A. I believe in the Father almighty, creator of Heaven and Earth, and His only begotten son, Christ, Who is born in every soul in every moment but is seen only by those who have cleared their vision by means of love. I believe that there is no such thing as useless knowledge. I believe that most, if not all, problems can be solved by working with the way of things rather than against it. I believe that any act can only be completely effective when performed without attachment or desire. I believe that the universe is the way God looks when viewed through the prism of time, space, and causality. I believe that the world as we know it is the interference pattern caused by the intersection of matter/energy and consciousness. I believe that even the most profound mystical speculation can be known and proved or disproved. I believe that nothing is difficult when one truly understands oneself. I believe that I am destined for greatness, even if that does not include anyone recognizing my greatness. I believe that religion is mostly a load of shit, but that its symbolism and ritual can be useful to one who wants to know the Truth. I believe that the vast majority of activity of the vast majority of people is useless service to an arbitrary system of meaningless and artificial laws, and that to let myself be bound by that system would be paralyzing and soul-crushing. I believe that everything is sacred. I believe that the sum of human knowledge is close to nothing.
Q. So?
A. So I’ll keep doing what I’ve been doing: learning everything I can, refusing to do anything without what I consider a decent reason, and creating interesting and beautiful things. I’m never going to have what other people would call a career, because I’ll never be able to see the point. And I’ll never settle down, because settling down feels to me like a prison. All I know how to do is to keep being what I am. And, ultimately, that’s what I’ve learned in the first half of the Year of Ram: how to just kind of be what I am. It’s not easy, but I’m getting there.
Tuesday, May 03, 2011
On smoking them out of their holes --
I'm well aware that no one gives a shit what I have to say. But it makes me feel better to say it. So, this is what I've been thinking about since last night:
First of all, the day I rejoice at the death of any living creature is the day I quit. Altogether. That would be the single easiest way to violate everything I believe in. Yes, Osama bin Laden was a bad guy who did bad things. But he had a mother, and he was once a little baby who just wanted to eat candy and watch "Davey & Goliath." I would not have liked being shot in the face upwards of two hundred times, and it seems unlikely to me that he did, either.
Once, when I was still living in the Shanty, I got up early to give a ride to some people my housemate didn't like. She said, "Why are you doing this? They aren't even nice to you." And I said, "Yes, but if I were in their position, I would want a ride. So I'm giving them a ride." She said, "It's not that simple." And I didn't want to argue, so I let it go. But what I wanted to say was, you're wrong. It is exactly that simple. It is that simple because I have decided, for me, that it will be. And I may not always live up to that ideal, but that doesn't make it stop being my ideal. And the fact is, that if I had killed thousands of people for vaguely-defined, mostly self-serving ideological reasons, I wouldn't want to be killed, and though this man was definitely what my father calls a "lower form of life," I can't help but empathize. If I don't, I'll feel like I'm betraying myself. I realize this isn't a particularly original sentiment, and it doesn't make me a particularly great individual; it's just what I have to do and think to get through the day and live with myself.
Second: I think it's important that all of us remember that we don't know how much this really changes. People have been talking about that question a lot in the Indian news, but I don't know how much it's coming up anywhere else. Had Osama bin Laden died much, much sooner after he (most likely) caused nineteen unhappy people to kill three thousand unhappy people, I think it would have been a much bigger symbolic victory. And it would almost definitely have prevented the whole mess of attacks in London, Madrid, Tunisia, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, and so on that followed in the wake of September 11th. This, to me, would have seemed like a good thing, although I would have had no way of knowing how many attacks had been prevented. But right now, when Al-Qaeda has been on the skids for five years, when the man has been doing nothing but avoiding this exact fate since Bush promised to "smoke him out of his hole," what has really been proven? Several Middle Eastern journalists have noted that the recent (partially) peaceful uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia does more to contradict Osama's rhetoric of the need for militant Muslim uprisings to cause social change than his death. It seems like this will cause a lot of changes in Afghanistan, where Al-Qaeda did a lot to finance the Taliban, but the simple fact is that America has not won the War on Terror. Because there is no victory in the War on Terror. Because terrorism is caused by exactly the kind of short-sighted self-serving foreign policy that the War on Terror specifically exemplifies.
That's the kind of statement I always make, and it's the kind of statement people always get mad about. Which is a completely sensible reaction, because it's an infuriating statement. What it sounds like I'm essentially saying is, this bad thing that happened to you is your fault. And I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that terrorism is America's fault. If I kill thousands of innocent people by flying a plane into a tall building in a large metropolitan area, that is categorically my fault. I am a murderer. This is not complicated. But just because it's not America's fault doesn't mean it isn't America's responsibility. The fact is that the developed world, with the United States in the lead, has created a world to which terrorism seems, to a lot of people, to be a reasonable response. And no matter how many years the War on Terror continues, no matter how many high-profile brown people are killed in very public ways, that's not going to change until the Western world's fundamental approach to the developing world changes. I would argue that the One Laptop Per Child program has done more to combat terrorism than the death of Osama bin Laden (although let's face it, OLPC is kind of a failure in a lot of ways).
The fact is that I see a difference between ethics and necessity. Maybe I'm wrong and there isn't one, because it seems really obvious to me but I always have a hell of a time explaining the difference to other people. But it seems entirely plausible to me that a person might be placed in a position to have to do something that isn't right. Like killing. In war, killing someone may be necessary. But just because it's necessary doesn't make it less terrible. It was probably necessary to kill Osama bin Laden. I have no way of knowing; I live in a village in India where four of my seven closest friends are three cows and a dog. I was not in Abbottabad, but I believe the President when he says that it was necessary to kill this guy. But we should not be celebrating having done what was necessary. I don't celebrate every time I go to the bathroom (Aaron does, but I rarely consider him to be a good example for anyone). We should be mourning. Not because a dude who sucked a lot got iced, but because we live in a world where we had to ice a dude rather than bring him to justice. Because justice would have involved a trial, a condemnation, a public review of every crime the man has ever committed, possibly even the revelation of many we didn't know about. Justice, as Katie Holmes points out in Batman Begins, is not the same as revenge. See? Even Katie Holmes understands this, and she married Tom Cruise. On purpose.
I know that this is idealistic. I have been around. I was shot at in the demonstrations in Bangkok (unless you're my parents, in which case I wasn't really; please don't have a heart attack). I once got in a fight in a club in Japan because some white dude didn't like my Japanese. I understand that the world we live in is not one in which we can deal with all our problems by hugging them out. But here's my position on that: it fucking sucks.
So what are you going to do about it? What are you doing to make a world in which it does not seem reasonable to send a bunch of Navy SEALs into a military camp to shoot a kind of insane bearded guy in the face two hundred times?
First of all, the day I rejoice at the death of any living creature is the day I quit. Altogether. That would be the single easiest way to violate everything I believe in. Yes, Osama bin Laden was a bad guy who did bad things. But he had a mother, and he was once a little baby who just wanted to eat candy and watch "Davey & Goliath." I would not have liked being shot in the face upwards of two hundred times, and it seems unlikely to me that he did, either.
Once, when I was still living in the Shanty, I got up early to give a ride to some people my housemate didn't like. She said, "Why are you doing this? They aren't even nice to you." And I said, "Yes, but if I were in their position, I would want a ride. So I'm giving them a ride." She said, "It's not that simple." And I didn't want to argue, so I let it go. But what I wanted to say was, you're wrong. It is exactly that simple. It is that simple because I have decided, for me, that it will be. And I may not always live up to that ideal, but that doesn't make it stop being my ideal. And the fact is, that if I had killed thousands of people for vaguely-defined, mostly self-serving ideological reasons, I wouldn't want to be killed, and though this man was definitely what my father calls a "lower form of life," I can't help but empathize. If I don't, I'll feel like I'm betraying myself. I realize this isn't a particularly original sentiment, and it doesn't make me a particularly great individual; it's just what I have to do and think to get through the day and live with myself.
Second: I think it's important that all of us remember that we don't know how much this really changes. People have been talking about that question a lot in the Indian news, but I don't know how much it's coming up anywhere else. Had Osama bin Laden died much, much sooner after he (most likely) caused nineteen unhappy people to kill three thousand unhappy people, I think it would have been a much bigger symbolic victory. And it would almost definitely have prevented the whole mess of attacks in London, Madrid, Tunisia, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, and so on that followed in the wake of September 11th. This, to me, would have seemed like a good thing, although I would have had no way of knowing how many attacks had been prevented. But right now, when Al-Qaeda has been on the skids for five years, when the man has been doing nothing but avoiding this exact fate since Bush promised to "smoke him out of his hole," what has really been proven? Several Middle Eastern journalists have noted that the recent (partially) peaceful uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia does more to contradict Osama's rhetoric of the need for militant Muslim uprisings to cause social change than his death. It seems like this will cause a lot of changes in Afghanistan, where Al-Qaeda did a lot to finance the Taliban, but the simple fact is that America has not won the War on Terror. Because there is no victory in the War on Terror. Because terrorism is caused by exactly the kind of short-sighted self-serving foreign policy that the War on Terror specifically exemplifies.
That's the kind of statement I always make, and it's the kind of statement people always get mad about. Which is a completely sensible reaction, because it's an infuriating statement. What it sounds like I'm essentially saying is, this bad thing that happened to you is your fault. And I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that terrorism is America's fault. If I kill thousands of innocent people by flying a plane into a tall building in a large metropolitan area, that is categorically my fault. I am a murderer. This is not complicated. But just because it's not America's fault doesn't mean it isn't America's responsibility. The fact is that the developed world, with the United States in the lead, has created a world to which terrorism seems, to a lot of people, to be a reasonable response. And no matter how many years the War on Terror continues, no matter how many high-profile brown people are killed in very public ways, that's not going to change until the Western world's fundamental approach to the developing world changes. I would argue that the One Laptop Per Child program has done more to combat terrorism than the death of Osama bin Laden (although let's face it, OLPC is kind of a failure in a lot of ways).
The fact is that I see a difference between ethics and necessity. Maybe I'm wrong and there isn't one, because it seems really obvious to me but I always have a hell of a time explaining the difference to other people. But it seems entirely plausible to me that a person might be placed in a position to have to do something that isn't right. Like killing. In war, killing someone may be necessary. But just because it's necessary doesn't make it less terrible. It was probably necessary to kill Osama bin Laden. I have no way of knowing; I live in a village in India where four of my seven closest friends are three cows and a dog. I was not in Abbottabad, but I believe the President when he says that it was necessary to kill this guy. But we should not be celebrating having done what was necessary. I don't celebrate every time I go to the bathroom (Aaron does, but I rarely consider him to be a good example for anyone). We should be mourning. Not because a dude who sucked a lot got iced, but because we live in a world where we had to ice a dude rather than bring him to justice. Because justice would have involved a trial, a condemnation, a public review of every crime the man has ever committed, possibly even the revelation of many we didn't know about. Justice, as Katie Holmes points out in Batman Begins, is not the same as revenge. See? Even Katie Holmes understands this, and she married Tom Cruise. On purpose.
I know that this is idealistic. I have been around. I was shot at in the demonstrations in Bangkok (unless you're my parents, in which case I wasn't really; please don't have a heart attack). I once got in a fight in a club in Japan because some white dude didn't like my Japanese. I understand that the world we live in is not one in which we can deal with all our problems by hugging them out. But here's my position on that: it fucking sucks.
So what are you going to do about it? What are you doing to make a world in which it does not seem reasonable to send a bunch of Navy SEALs into a military camp to shoot a kind of insane bearded guy in the face two hundred times?
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Happy New Year --
First of all, here's the only half-decent song I recorded in calendar year 2010. It was an okay year to be me, all things considered, but it wasn't a great year for music. Anyway, this song represents my vision for 2011. More or less.
I guess I should tell you what's up? I probably (but not definitely) got my Indian dual-citizenship. So I guess I'm going to fulfill my lifelong dream and move to India, finally. I may or may not have gotten a job at a school already. It's hard to say.
I feel bleak all the time, but this has been a particularly bleak year. But I've had a lot of fun and met a lot of people. I still don't have any particular interest in the joys of this world, but I know a lot of stuff, and I'd like to know a lot more stuff. I guess that's something. But Jesus H. Christ, it'd be pretty nice to do one goddamn thing without doing it wrong.
Hindus, who have been telling me things my whole life, always talk about concentrating on actions, and not the fruits of actions: doing things without worrying particularly about the outcome. Like a kid who is obsessed with marbles growing up and playing marbles with his granddaughter. He can still enjoy the game, but with age comes detachment, which means he can enjoy it without his entire sense of self-worth depending on whether or not he wins. For a very long time I have tried to develop that sense of play in life, the feeling of putting on a great performance without being fussed about the audience. I think slowly, for the first time in my life, I'm starting to understand what that really means.
Happy New Year.
I guess I should tell you what's up? I probably (but not definitely) got my Indian dual-citizenship. So I guess I'm going to fulfill my lifelong dream and move to India, finally. I may or may not have gotten a job at a school already. It's hard to say.
I feel bleak all the time, but this has been a particularly bleak year. But I've had a lot of fun and met a lot of people. I still don't have any particular interest in the joys of this world, but I know a lot of stuff, and I'd like to know a lot more stuff. I guess that's something. But Jesus H. Christ, it'd be pretty nice to do one goddamn thing without doing it wrong.
Hindus, who have been telling me things my whole life, always talk about concentrating on actions, and not the fruits of actions: doing things without worrying particularly about the outcome. Like a kid who is obsessed with marbles growing up and playing marbles with his granddaughter. He can still enjoy the game, but with age comes detachment, which means he can enjoy it without his entire sense of self-worth depending on whether or not he wins. For a very long time I have tried to develop that sense of play in life, the feeling of putting on a great performance without being fussed about the audience. I think slowly, for the first time in my life, I'm starting to understand what that really means.
Happy New Year.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
பொங்கலோ பொங்கல் --
Today was Pongal, one of the most important holidays in the Hindu calendar -- primarily the Tamil version. In Chennai right now they're having a three- or four-day extravaganza that will, by the time it's over, involve painting cows, burning old clothes, and eating pongal, the eponymous dish made from rice and sugar. (This, incidentally, is a move that I think white people should consider with regards to Thanksgiving. Just give up all the pretense and say, "Come over to my house! We've made enough thanksgiving for everybody!" "No, thanks. To be honest, I don't really like thanksgiving except on Thanksgiving.") I celebrated Pongal by saying some prayers to the Sun and the Ganges in the morning and evening, then eating a loaf of bread with some cheese and butter. I tried to watch a Tamil movie, but got frustrated at how little I understood and turned it off.
My cultural identity crisis is tautologically a first-world problem: it is a problem caused directly by my parents' move from the third world to the first. But while I know how good I've got it compared to so many in the world -- compared, let's be honest, to my father, who grew up penniless next to a crematorium -- I still can't help but feel crushed whenever a day like this comes up. I've been living away from the United States for a few years now -- an exile from my exile -- and I've seen how other Americans feel sad around Thanksgiving or Christmas. They miss the things they used to do with their families, the foods they used to eat, the thousand little traditions each family had and maintained as a way of showing each other that they were just that -- a family. I, meanwhile, have just gone through an entire day that means nothing to me outside of what I've read in books. We've never celebrated Pongal at my house, because it's always during the school year, most often on a school day. For me, the day was usually marked by my mother reminding me in the morning that it was, in fact, Pongal, and then mentioning at dinner what she and her family used to do when she was a child in India. That's what it's like to be born in exile: the motherland is always dreamlike, fantastical. India to me has always been a collection of anecdotes I've heard from my parents first and a real country that I've visited second. And to be in exile from the exile in which you were born, unlikely though it seems, is to make the alienation more palpable, more poignant because more prominent in your life. I find myself feeling nostalgia for things I have never experienced, wishing not that I were celebrating Pongal right now, but that I had done so when I was a child.
Every holiday on the calendar makes me feel like I'm not Indian enough. Every festival that dawns on my face looking puzzled, with no clue as to how I'm supposed to celebrate it, is another tiny casualty in the battle for culture -- mine, India's, the world's. Every time I hear a Tamil word I don't know, or encounter a Hindu religious tradition I'm not familiar with, I think of the Library of Alexandria: an incalculable loss for world culture, sure -- but imagine how minimal it would have been if those books had been in people's heads instead of on shelves. Until extraordinarily recently, the greater part of India's monumental body of literature, spanning centuries and showing a tremendous degree of sophistication and beauty, existed primarily in the memories of Indians. Priests memorized entire recensions of the Veda, thousands and tens of thousands of verses, and spread them solely by teaching them, face to face with students. The epics, the Itihasa and Purana, were transmitted by memory long before anyone thought to record them. There were a number of reasons for this: the Vedas, and possibly the epics, were composed long before the advent of a writing system, for Sanskrit or any other written language. Even after the Brahmi script and its descendants had become current, the tradition remained mostly oral in the name of -- well, of tradition. And certainly it's useful, in a debate or as a teacher of scripture, to have an entire body of literature at your beck and call whenever you want to support yourself with a quotation. But I can't help but wonder if the sages who composed the Vedas considered a situation like mine, that of an Indian born in America living in Thailand who wants nothing more right now than to perform the right rituals for the winter transit of the Sun. Imagine, if I had volumes and volumes of hymns and religious manuals stored in my brain, how much easier it would be for me to understand what it means to be an Indian who knows so little about India.
Or maybe it wouldn't. If I'd spent my whole childhood just learning the Vedas, I wouldn't know much about the Tanakh, the Gospels, the Qur'an, Ulysses. Or the Beatles. Or Star Wars. All of which have had as much effect on who I am now as being Indian has. But I constantly wonder what it would have been like to grow up just knowing all this stuff. Would I have been more comfortable and confident in my identity? Or would I just have found new ways to feel insecure and inadequate?
I read The Namesake on the plane back from India this time and thought: I'm twenty-six, and it's time. I've spent my whole life slowly drifting toward Chennai; now it's in my power to just decide I'm going there. I love this school here in Bangkok, but my contract is up in August. After that we'll see.
My cultural identity crisis is tautologically a first-world problem: it is a problem caused directly by my parents' move from the third world to the first. But while I know how good I've got it compared to so many in the world -- compared, let's be honest, to my father, who grew up penniless next to a crematorium -- I still can't help but feel crushed whenever a day like this comes up. I've been living away from the United States for a few years now -- an exile from my exile -- and I've seen how other Americans feel sad around Thanksgiving or Christmas. They miss the things they used to do with their families, the foods they used to eat, the thousand little traditions each family had and maintained as a way of showing each other that they were just that -- a family. I, meanwhile, have just gone through an entire day that means nothing to me outside of what I've read in books. We've never celebrated Pongal at my house, because it's always during the school year, most often on a school day. For me, the day was usually marked by my mother reminding me in the morning that it was, in fact, Pongal, and then mentioning at dinner what she and her family used to do when she was a child in India. That's what it's like to be born in exile: the motherland is always dreamlike, fantastical. India to me has always been a collection of anecdotes I've heard from my parents first and a real country that I've visited second. And to be in exile from the exile in which you were born, unlikely though it seems, is to make the alienation more palpable, more poignant because more prominent in your life. I find myself feeling nostalgia for things I have never experienced, wishing not that I were celebrating Pongal right now, but that I had done so when I was a child.
Every holiday on the calendar makes me feel like I'm not Indian enough. Every festival that dawns on my face looking puzzled, with no clue as to how I'm supposed to celebrate it, is another tiny casualty in the battle for culture -- mine, India's, the world's. Every time I hear a Tamil word I don't know, or encounter a Hindu religious tradition I'm not familiar with, I think of the Library of Alexandria: an incalculable loss for world culture, sure -- but imagine how minimal it would have been if those books had been in people's heads instead of on shelves. Until extraordinarily recently, the greater part of India's monumental body of literature, spanning centuries and showing a tremendous degree of sophistication and beauty, existed primarily in the memories of Indians. Priests memorized entire recensions of the Veda, thousands and tens of thousands of verses, and spread them solely by teaching them, face to face with students. The epics, the Itihasa and Purana, were transmitted by memory long before anyone thought to record them. There were a number of reasons for this: the Vedas, and possibly the epics, were composed long before the advent of a writing system, for Sanskrit or any other written language. Even after the Brahmi script and its descendants had become current, the tradition remained mostly oral in the name of -- well, of tradition. And certainly it's useful, in a debate or as a teacher of scripture, to have an entire body of literature at your beck and call whenever you want to support yourself with a quotation. But I can't help but wonder if the sages who composed the Vedas considered a situation like mine, that of an Indian born in America living in Thailand who wants nothing more right now than to perform the right rituals for the winter transit of the Sun. Imagine, if I had volumes and volumes of hymns and religious manuals stored in my brain, how much easier it would be for me to understand what it means to be an Indian who knows so little about India.
Or maybe it wouldn't. If I'd spent my whole childhood just learning the Vedas, I wouldn't know much about the Tanakh, the Gospels, the Qur'an, Ulysses. Or the Beatles. Or Star Wars. All of which have had as much effect on who I am now as being Indian has. But I constantly wonder what it would have been like to grow up just knowing all this stuff. Would I have been more comfortable and confident in my identity? Or would I just have found new ways to feel insecure and inadequate?
I read The Namesake on the plane back from India this time and thought: I'm twenty-six, and it's time. I've spent my whole life slowly drifting toward Chennai; now it's in my power to just decide I'm going there. I love this school here in Bangkok, but my contract is up in August. After that we'll see.
Sunday, March 01, 2009
Finally! --
I've been writing "Monica" for about three goddamn years. I'm so glad I did it. I have kind of a lot to say about it.
1. I didn't give it the full twenty-four-guitar treatment because I'm just trying to illustrate the basic idea. I'm trying to kind of show the dynamic contour. It starts out very quiet, just the acoustic guitar and the voice, and then the band comes in really light for the Cairo and Hong Kong part, and then the solo is loud and rock'n'roll, and then it goes quiet again for the "all the sailors" part. Only it's an intense quiet, a driving little buildup. And then it explodes again for the ending.
2. Speaking of the ending, I'm not sure what to do about it. I was thinking of "Be Mine" by REM, where it ends with playing the chorus without words over and over again. A fade would fit the meaning of the lyrics, but it doesn't feel right for the song somehow.
3. Sorry the "solo" sucks so much. But the idea I'm trying to get across is that when the outro chords come up in the solo, it kind of suggests the riff from the outro without actually being the riff from the outro. I'm not sure how to explain it, so I hope that makes sense. The ending is pretty much exactly like I want it to be, I think.
4. I'm not entirely happy with the lyrics to the verse about Cairo. I think the rest of the lyrics are pretty okay, though. I do feel like something's missing, but maybe it's just because I tried to fit too much story into one little rock song.
5. The stretch from the first "never going to love me" to the solo is all by Tyson. He also suggested a breakdown where it goes into four and rocks out. I'm starting to think that might have been better to make the crash into "the only thing that's left to me" more dramatic. I don't know, I kind of like the idea of the tempo never changing, though.
6. I want a rich vocal tapestry all over this. Like, using a combination of background "oooooo"s and harmonies with the lead vocal to help accentuate the dynamic changes. Especially in the actual "Monica" part, about the sailors and everything. I tried to record some harmonies there, to show what I meant, but I just could not figure them out, so I skipped it.
So, in summary, the key word is epic. I only kind of suggested it here, due to limited resources and even more limited talent, but I think you can pretty much see what I'm going for. Also, I'm sorry it became seven and a half minutes long. I don't know how that happened.
I've been writing "Monica" for about three goddamn years. I'm so glad I did it. I have kind of a lot to say about it.
1. I didn't give it the full twenty-four-guitar treatment because I'm just trying to illustrate the basic idea. I'm trying to kind of show the dynamic contour. It starts out very quiet, just the acoustic guitar and the voice, and then the band comes in really light for the Cairo and Hong Kong part, and then the solo is loud and rock'n'roll, and then it goes quiet again for the "all the sailors" part. Only it's an intense quiet, a driving little buildup. And then it explodes again for the ending.
2. Speaking of the ending, I'm not sure what to do about it. I was thinking of "Be Mine" by REM, where it ends with playing the chorus without words over and over again. A fade would fit the meaning of the lyrics, but it doesn't feel right for the song somehow.
3. Sorry the "solo" sucks so much. But the idea I'm trying to get across is that when the outro chords come up in the solo, it kind of suggests the riff from the outro without actually being the riff from the outro. I'm not sure how to explain it, so I hope that makes sense. The ending is pretty much exactly like I want it to be, I think.
4. I'm not entirely happy with the lyrics to the verse about Cairo. I think the rest of the lyrics are pretty okay, though. I do feel like something's missing, but maybe it's just because I tried to fit too much story into one little rock song.
5. The stretch from the first "never going to love me" to the solo is all by Tyson. He also suggested a breakdown where it goes into four and rocks out. I'm starting to think that might have been better to make the crash into "the only thing that's left to me" more dramatic. I don't know, I kind of like the idea of the tempo never changing, though.
6. I want a rich vocal tapestry all over this. Like, using a combination of background "oooooo"s and harmonies with the lead vocal to help accentuate the dynamic changes. Especially in the actual "Monica" part, about the sailors and everything. I tried to record some harmonies there, to show what I meant, but I just could not figure them out, so I skipped it.
So, in summary, the key word is epic. I only kind of suggested it here, due to limited resources and even more limited talent, but I think you can pretty much see what I'm going for. Also, I'm sorry it became seven and a half minutes long. I don't know how that happened.
Wait, don't go home --
As always, a bad recording of a possibly decent song. "Used-up Fagged-out Goodfornothing Blues" is a timely commentary on the current socioeconomic situation. Now, I'm not very good at playing the guitar, and I'm not very good at singing, and this song is demanding in both areas, but I promise you that I can do better than this; I just had some technical problems this time. Oh, and the parts where nothing is happening are where solos go.
As always, a bad recording of a possibly decent song. "Used-up Fagged-out Goodfornothing Blues" is a timely commentary on the current socioeconomic situation. Now, I'm not very good at playing the guitar, and I'm not very good at singing, and this song is demanding in both areas, but I promise you that I can do better than this; I just had some technical problems this time. Oh, and the parts where nothing is happening are where solos go.
Monday, February 02, 2009
Same as the old boss --
I think a lot, and I have all these notebooks and no idea what to do with them, so I had this idea. I figured out that I can just kind of carry a little notebook around with me and write stuff that I thought of. So I'm going to start doing that, and then I'm also going to post anything I think is interesting up here. I don't think it's going to be structured or anything, like the sermons I was writing before I came to Japan. It's just going to be some ideas about things. Ideas and things being pretty much all there is. Just, you know, caveat lector -- they're not all going to be winners. So here's the first one:
I've had this idea that's been kicking around in my head for a while. The term I came up with is "teleological crisis," which isn't wholly accurate but does sound impressive as all hell. The idea came to me when I was thinking about CSI. Bear with me:
My last girlfriend really liked CSI. I can't figure out why, because as far as I can tell the show is complete shit. It's just stupid. And David Caruso is the most embarrassing thing you can look at. But, you know, there's no accounting for taste, and hers is already questionable because she was dating me at the time. Anyway. One of the seventy-two million currently-airing CSI shows, the first one I saw, uses "Won't Get Fooled Again" as its theme song. I remember thinking that was an odd choice. But then I learned, somehow, that the original show used "Who Are You" as its theme song. And that actually makes sense, because it's a song that's thematically appropriate for the show. So here's what happened, as closely as I can reconstruct it: they made the first show, with an appropriate theme song, but then suddenly were in danger of not making a shitload of money and had to quickly produce another show. So they had to pick a new theme song, and they picked another well-known song by the Who. Only this one had nothing whatsoever to do with a show about detectives; it just happened to be by the same band as the first theme song. Teleological crisis. The purpose of a custom or cultural artifact was partially (or wholly) misunderstood, and thus the custom was maintained improperly in a way that accomplished nothing.
Or, for example, the electoral college. As far as I know, the two reasons it was started were that the Founding Fathers didn't trust ordinary people to vote right, and to simplify counting votes in a time when ballots were literally just pieces of paper with names written on them that human beings had to read one by one. Obviously neither of those is quite so much of a concern now. But because the practice has ossified into tradition, it's extremely difficult to change. Most laypeople agree that the electoral college doesn't really do us any good, and everyone knows the outcome of the presidential election by the morning after election day -- the day the electoral college votes goes by almost unnoticed. And yet, we keep on doing things that way, on and on.
Neither of those really illustrates what I mean by crisis, though, because they're both kind of dead ends. I said "teleological crisis" because I was thinking of cases where it actually leads to a sea change into something rich and strange. Like the electric wires that are conveying these words to your computer screen. They were originally intended for telegraph signals, which were then replaced by telephones, which were then replaced by the internet. Only throughout all those changes, the basic infrastructure has stayed pretty much the same. The wires have gotten more sophisticated, better shielded, more reliable, and so on, but essentially the system remained a length of copper conducting electrical information between two increasingly complex devices on the ends of it. Then came the crisis, when it was realized that now that we were no longer dealing with actually moving a speaker or a telegraphity clickity thing anymore, so we no longer need actual electricity electricity. And now we have fiber-optic cables all over the globe.
This isn't a particularly productive idea. It doesn't provide us with anything new. It's just a model for thinking about certain moments and events in history, especially cultural and technological history. I guess in the right hands, it could also be a useful model for figuring out what we still need and what we can leave on the scrapheap of Time.
I think a lot, and I have all these notebooks and no idea what to do with them, so I had this idea. I figured out that I can just kind of carry a little notebook around with me and write stuff that I thought of. So I'm going to start doing that, and then I'm also going to post anything I think is interesting up here. I don't think it's going to be structured or anything, like the sermons I was writing before I came to Japan. It's just going to be some ideas about things. Ideas and things being pretty much all there is. Just, you know, caveat lector -- they're not all going to be winners. So here's the first one:
I've had this idea that's been kicking around in my head for a while. The term I came up with is "teleological crisis," which isn't wholly accurate but does sound impressive as all hell. The idea came to me when I was thinking about CSI. Bear with me:
My last girlfriend really liked CSI. I can't figure out why, because as far as I can tell the show is complete shit. It's just stupid. And David Caruso is the most embarrassing thing you can look at. But, you know, there's no accounting for taste, and hers is already questionable because she was dating me at the time. Anyway. One of the seventy-two million currently-airing CSI shows, the first one I saw, uses "Won't Get Fooled Again" as its theme song. I remember thinking that was an odd choice. But then I learned, somehow, that the original show used "Who Are You" as its theme song. And that actually makes sense, because it's a song that's thematically appropriate for the show. So here's what happened, as closely as I can reconstruct it: they made the first show, with an appropriate theme song, but then suddenly were in danger of not making a shitload of money and had to quickly produce another show. So they had to pick a new theme song, and they picked another well-known song by the Who. Only this one had nothing whatsoever to do with a show about detectives; it just happened to be by the same band as the first theme song. Teleological crisis. The purpose of a custom or cultural artifact was partially (or wholly) misunderstood, and thus the custom was maintained improperly in a way that accomplished nothing.
Or, for example, the electoral college. As far as I know, the two reasons it was started were that the Founding Fathers didn't trust ordinary people to vote right, and to simplify counting votes in a time when ballots were literally just pieces of paper with names written on them that human beings had to read one by one. Obviously neither of those is quite so much of a concern now. But because the practice has ossified into tradition, it's extremely difficult to change. Most laypeople agree that the electoral college doesn't really do us any good, and everyone knows the outcome of the presidential election by the morning after election day -- the day the electoral college votes goes by almost unnoticed. And yet, we keep on doing things that way, on and on.
Neither of those really illustrates what I mean by crisis, though, because they're both kind of dead ends. I said "teleological crisis" because I was thinking of cases where it actually leads to a sea change into something rich and strange. Like the electric wires that are conveying these words to your computer screen. They were originally intended for telegraph signals, which were then replaced by telephones, which were then replaced by the internet. Only throughout all those changes, the basic infrastructure has stayed pretty much the same. The wires have gotten more sophisticated, better shielded, more reliable, and so on, but essentially the system remained a length of copper conducting electrical information between two increasingly complex devices on the ends of it. Then came the crisis, when it was realized that now that we were no longer dealing with actually moving a speaker or a telegraphity clickity thing anymore, so we no longer need actual electricity electricity. And now we have fiber-optic cables all over the globe.
This isn't a particularly productive idea. It doesn't provide us with anything new. It's just a model for thinking about certain moments and events in history, especially cultural and technological history. I guess in the right hands, it could also be a useful model for figuring out what we still need and what we can leave on the scrapheap of Time.
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