A flâneur in the city of knowledge

Since the last long post I wrote I have been having some confusion about what to write next. As often happens in those situations, I do nothing until I think I have worked out what is exactly the right thing to do next. This, for the record, is not a good strategy. There is no exactly right thing to do next.

The reason I became confused was actually rather silly. I had some good feedback from the last long post I wrote, and it was something of a departure from what I have written on this blog. It was a set of preliminary thoughts about some things I am thinking about in my academic work as well as my personal life, rather than about the writing process. After I posted it, I started feeling the pressure to write something in that vein again, and then I pondered whether that really fit with the blog, and then I started having absolutely lethal thoughts about how I am an academic and should really write a more professional blog. I left myself some room to move from the beginning by describing the blog as about ‘writing and thinking I have not yet done’, but my scholarly training in proper specialization and focus started eating away at the joy I had begun to take in writing this blog.

Although it makes sense to define the scope of your blog, as social media experts are always telling us, I realized that in mulling over these questions I was letting the same thing happen to my blog as graduate school training did to my love of intellectual work. I was participating in the process of making a neoliberal homo economicus of myself, as we are relentlessly encouraged and enabled to do. (Here, by the way, is a beautifully clear and concrete way to understand what the homo economicus is in the neoliberal age by Lucy.) I started worrying about specialization and focus, but to what end? I am not trying to make money out of this and certainly don’t have the readership, in any case, to worry about whether I am fulfilling a pact with my readers who expect to read about x, but not about y. I was also worried about the consistency of the product, but again, to what end? Consistency belongs on CVs and job applications, where you are trying to demonstrate that everything you’ve done before has naturally led to this moment when you will become a Research Assistant or Senior Policy Analyst. Here, I am trying to do quite the opposite thing, which is to write without constantly being bothered by the thought that I am a ‘professional’ academic.

My primary goal in starting this blog was to find a way back to the joy I used to take in writing and thinking. Along the way, this intention has allowed me to write about a variety of things that have become important to my thinking, such as meditation, as well as things that simply sparked my intellectual curiosity, such as the posts about the mathematician Gödel or going to see Philip Glass’ opera Satyagraha. At the moment, it seems necessary to me to carry on writing from this rather broadly defined space, perhaps paradoxically because this is the only way I can imagine being able to go on being an academic specialist for the next thirty years.

There isn’t enough space to meander anymore in academic life and that is undoubtedly one source of many scholars’ melancholy about their work in the contemporary university. I think that this works in two ways. In the first place, it means that people feel the pressure to stick to their area of expertise. It is time-consuming and risky to branch out too much into reading and thinking about other things that interest you. It is time-consuming because you only have so much time to read in addition to marking, lecturing, administering and writing, so you become very careful about reading ‘outside your field’. It is risky, because if you start writing about every little thing that you find interesting (assuming you can keep up with the literature), your ‘profile’ starts to look eccentric, even unprofessional, and hiring committees and funding reviewers don’t know what you are. At least, that’s what ‘they’ say. You confine yourself, because it seems professionally dangerous to do otherwise. But on the other hand, you thereby become, as described by Benjamin Nugent in another context, a monomaniac. All this specialization and focus starts to wear you down until you can’t think anything because you keep trying to think about the same, one thing. You start to lose your ability to connect things in unexpected ways and thereby generate new insights because you aren’t exposing your mind to any contrasts or differences that could set off that flash of thought.

If we want to preserve some time to explore, to saunter, to be flâneurs in the city of knowledge, then it is up to us to resist the urge to manage ourselves at all times as if we were an enterprise. Posts I have planned for the near future include more thoughts on the lived experience of diasporic culture, a review of Ann Cvetkovich’s Depression: A Public Feeling, Deleuze’s anti-medical view of literature and the usual assorted comments on dealing with procrastination. Maybe, hopefully, I’ll run into you along the way, out on your own explorations in the city of knowledge.

 

Writing at the border

“How else can one write but of those things which one doesn’t know, or knows badly? It is precisely there that we imagine having something to say. We write only at the frontiers of our knowledge, at the border which separates our knowledge from our ignorance and transforms the one into the other. Only in this matter are we resolved to write. To satisfy ignorance is to put off writing until tomorrow – or rather, to make it impossible.”

Gilles Deleuze

 

Sunday afternoon at the movies with Papa

I.

Here, if you have never encountered her before, is the beautiful Nutan.

When my father was a young man growing up in Mauritius in the 1950s and 60s he was a great fan of Nutan’s films, among others. Years later he, an inveterate hummer, would go about our home crooning the musical phrases that he had learned from those days at the cinema. Tapes he made of all his favourite, old Hindi film songs provided the background music of my childhood. Mostly, we listened to his tapes and not my mother’s, who was a much more dedicated cinephile. The ‘problem’ was that my father’s tapes were from classic, Hindi-language cinema, whereas my mother’s tapes were from equally classic, but completely unfamiliar (to my father) Tamil-language cinema. I can sing this just as easily as this, and listening to either one cheers me up no end, but lately I’ve been curious about what exactly happens when I listen to and replay these songs.

The most obvious answer is that these songs strengthen my connection to my father, who died when I was eighteen. This music in particular was one of the things I saw my father genuinely enjoy. In the years before he died one of the few things he approved of and enjoyed watching on television was a wonderful documentary series about Indian film music that the UK’s Channel Four broadcast in the late 1980s called ‘Movie Mahal‘. I watched that documentary with him, as well as the many replays on video, and that is how I came to be able to sing those songs (though I don’t speak a word of Hindi or Urdu myself).

The affective power of remembering being happy with my father or of seeing him be happy is strong. The last few years of his life were seriously affected by the cancer that he died from and it was hard for a long time afterwards to remember how vibrant he had been before his illness. What I have been thinking about, however, is something more immediate than nostalgia. I don’t enjoy these songs because my father enjoyed them. I enjoy them because they offer me something in my own daily life that I don’t get elsewhere, something that for lack of a better word I would call my ‘Indianness’.

II.

Despite my name and appearance, I don’t take any ‘Indianness’ I might experience for granted because I am displaced from a lived-experience of India. My father was a diasporic Indian whose native language was French and I grew up in the Western world. In daily life, the most tangible sign of our origins was our Hindu vegetarian diet, and the fact that my grandmother wore a sari every day of her life in London in all weather conditions. On the other hand, my mother was born and brought up in urban Southern India, away but not dislocated from rural Tamil Nadu where her family, on both sides, had always lived. She is also a traditionalist by nature and it is because of her that I feel as physically comfortable in a sari as I do in a pair of jeans. However, I don’t speak any Indian languages and that has always been a big stumbling block because it means I cannot participate in any Indian community fully other than a very middle-class, professional one where everyone speaks English anyway. Outside my family home, I have mostly participated in Indian community through what I would describe as a cultural-pedagogical function where my experience of community has been linked with performing, rehearsing and displaying Indianness for others. From my teens to my twenties I regularly participated in events put on by multicultural associations where ‘we’ displayed our Indianness and educated people about it (selling Indian food, displaying Indian fashions and dancing) and from an earlier age I also studied and performed classical bharatanatyam.

So I don’t understand the songs my father, or mother, used to listen to literally and they don’t connect me to any natural or obvious community, but they allow me to experience something about myself that is missing from my daily ways of negotiating my perceived and assumed Indianness in the Western world (whether that means explaining myself or, equally, trying hard not to explain myself because eventually we have to learn to resist the colonial demand for difference to explain itself). Sometimes I have a very strong sense of being restored to myself when I listen to these songs or dance one of my old pieces. What is it that I feel? Is it ‘a fancy, or a feeling’?

III.

For no reason that I can explain clearly, yet, I think my father  and I were both tapping into embodied experiences that we were brought up in but had no language for in our different diasporic situations. We felt and understood things, and even yearned for them, though we didn’t exactly know what they were called. Language captures different aspects of our experience of the world and different languages distribute that experience along different axes. Ancient Indian aesthetic theory is based on the communication of the eight rasas, which are all recognizable human experiences but not necessarily the ones that other aesthetic theories would consider core. That isn’t a controversial idea in itself, until people start arguing about whether their core actually makes more sense than other people’s cores, but it starts to unravel when you think about people who travel between worlds. How can I claim to have lived experience and affect of a world that I don’t belong to linguistically? I can lay a cultural claim, but since culture isn’t an essence you are born with–I had to learn to dance bharatanatyam, just like every other little girl who takes up her dancing bells in India–how do I make sense of the feeling-experience I have in my mind and body when I sing a Tamil song or dance a padam?

In the age of multiculturalism such questions matter more than ever, because of the fuzzy and confused notions we have of what it means to be located in a culture. As one humanities critic wrote some years ago, those who ‘tolerate’ other people’s cultures often make the mistake of thinking that the differences Others exhibit are ‘overlays on a substratum of essential humanity‘. It is an incomparably good thing that many of us realize Others are not ‘essentially’ lesser than us, but another kind of essence creeps back in when we believe that others are exactly like us, but with an Indian or Nigerian or Russian coating. I think there is some room between being ‘essentially’, ‘timelessly’ Indian (clearly, an impossibility) and being an Indian-flavoured ‘human’ (delicious, I am sure, but not what I am); the question is, how to communicate it?

IV.

Look again at Nutan. Or listen to the Tamil song. Or watch the bharatanatyam performance. Tell me what you see and feel.

 

Writing about writing (instead of writing)

When I started 2012 with a resolution, of sorts, to write every day for a month it was primarily as an exercise in awareness. I wanted then, as I still do, to be someone who, on a daily basis, writes mindfully and patiently. Clearly that is still a work in progress, but it is equally clear to me that I wouldn’t keep trying to write, however painfully, if I didn’t actually want to do it.

Nevertheless, soon after I started the month of blogging last year I met up with an old friend–who was kindly reading the blog–and he said, ‘you sure write a lot about not writing’. That made me laugh, but I have to admit that I also felt rather shamefaced about it because I was afraid it was true. What I heard my friend say, which wasn’t necessarily what he meant at all, was ‘you keep writing about writing–why don’t you just write (you seem to be able to)?’

The answer is that I find it difficult to say what I want to say, and I’ve realized that this is largely because I am not clear in my own mind who I am writing for. Some writers think that you primarily write for yourself, but I have never found that very convincing because if you wanted to write for yourself there really would be no reason to make it available to other people. If you want to write–and you want other people to read what you write–then you are trying to build a relationship with other people.

After I wrote my last post about writing as an act of hospitality I realized the metaphor was a genuinely enabling one, and a kind of answer to the problem of the ‘others’ to whom we address ourselves. At first, perhaps, you don’t invite just anyone into your home. You make plans, you prepare, and you cultivate a friendship with people before you invite them over. It is possible that for the rest of your life you never learn to have people over any differently. You keep a tight rein on things–only inviting people you like and know into your home, with much forethought about what you will serve them and the music you will play. People entertain and write like that quite profitably and prolifically. Maybe you have always been a bit more freewheeling. You invite anyone over, at any time, with a breezy ‘excuse the mess’ while you push all the newspapers, candy wrappers and other jetsam onto the floor. You invite people in easily, and have some fun too, but perhaps people don’t often invite you back or want to stay around a very long time. Or maybe you love to have people over, but for some reason or other you never quite get around to it and always meet up in restaurants or coffeeshops instead. Whatever it is, you know what you normally do and how it pretty much generates the same  encounter over and over again.

Quite literally, I find myself without a place to host from. I’ve moved around a lot over the last fifteen years–from Canada, to the UK, to Finland, back to Canada, back to the UK–and so I have a lot of friends I would love to have over, but I never seem to be in one place long enough to get the party started. Instead, I have a lot of once-a-year meals in restaurants with friends that I haven’t seen for a long time. I seldom have anyone over and I rely on relatively new friends in all those places to invite me into their settled homes, or old friends to put me up in their homes for 2-3 days at a time while we reconnect until the next annual, or biennial meeting. I suppose this is where metaphor meets the world-as-it-is. I am not sure where my place in the world is.

Diasporic and migrant writing emerges from an experience of dislocation, of making home again in a new place without losing sight of the old place and telling a story about that. But multiple dislocations become harder and harder to narrate. It isn’t that the experience itself is absolutely disorienting (I am not confused about who I am), but more that we still–as yet–lack the narrative forms to tell the story of being frequently on the move, between here and there. (I’ve often wondered how an agent would sell my short stories set in various small towns around Canada and Finland, with some metropolitan tales of London and Helsinki thrown in.)

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari developed the concept of ‘minor literature’ to capture the idea of stories that are written for people who don’t yet exist, or better who are in the process of becoming. To keep following my metaphor, minor literature is a kind of hospitality-as-a-way of life, hospitality on a grand scale, where you prepare to host people you don’t know, who you aren’t entirely sure are ever going to show up. You create a space that they will feel is theirs, without quite knowing who they are or when they will arrive. The result might be bizarre (think Kafka or G V Desani or Rosario Ferré), but it is also strangely compelling. You want to keep going back there, but you don’t know why. How does the minor writer, the one who creates this hospitable experience for unknown others, write? Kafka’s example isn’t exactly a happy one, but his writing is, in its extraordinary way, a place where all kinds of people can enter and feel at home. (Years of teaching Kafka has empirically demonstrated that to me.)

It is difficult to say what you want to say, especially when you are a writer since, as Thomas Mann wrote, ‘a writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people’. All you can do is keep following your impulse to persist in writing and making a place, a text, for people who you trust will appear one day. One day, instead of writing about writing, you will find yourself writing.

 

Friends, Audience, Community (and Guests)

Over the last week I read Christopher Jamison’s Finding Sanctuary, about applying Benedictine monastic rules of life outside the monastery. Abbot Jamison has a compelling way of discussing concepts such as virtue, obedience and humility as the crucial tools we have all been missing in our search for inner peace and I enjoyed the book very much.

One of the things that most struck a chord with me was his discussion of how we relate our daily practice to other people. In some of my earliest posts, here and here, I talked about the great desire I’ve always had to enter into meaningful, intelligent conversation with other people, and the increasingly unsettling feeling that academic life was actually becoming an obstacle to fulfilling that desire. It is something I’ve been mulling over for a long time, and when I read my friend Scott’s blog post about an ambivalent experience he had of reading a valuable academic book, I found myself struggling with it again.

I genuinely believe that any sphere of human activity provides us with all we need to live an ethically meaningful life. That being said, writing for a living, especially as an academic, has always seemed a bit tricky to me, because for me it is so full of ethical pitfalls. You have to be in the business of promoting yourself, getting yourself read and cited and creating a coherent academic profile (read brand) and all for whom? Mostly, you are writing for a very small audience of people who may not be friends or community, but have read the same texts in roughly the same context.

From Scott’s perspective, as an activist-intellectual who does his work in spaces that institutional academia either ignores or actively marginalizes, I can see that a particular kind of academic writing–however insightful–appears limited in its productive power to change the world. That is not a criticism of Scott, because it is exactly what I think to myself when I set about my own academic work. I come back to the thought that this is my sphere of human activity in which to do what I can, but I am not always convinced that is a good answer.

One of the examples in Abbot Jamison’s book gave me an idea about how I might reconceptualize this question. The ritual of monastic life is built upon a community of brothers who all know exactly why things are done in a particular way. They are like a group of academics with scholarly conventions that guide their daily lives–you don’t have to explain to them why articles are written in a certain form, or why literature scholars use MLA instead of APA citation styles. Jamison goes on to explain, however, that hospitality is very important in the Benedictine rule and so it should always be possible for guests to be welcomed into the monastery without making it impossible for the monks to go about their tasks.

He explains:

Life is so arranged that a guest can be welcomed generously as a matter of course and without any disruption. In this way Benedict maintains a balance between the internal needs of the sanctuary and the external demands placed upon it. Ritual makes this possible for families as well so that, for example, a visitor can be welcomed to a family meal both easily and graciously, whereas simply feeding the guest is both disruptive and not very hospitable. A test of a sanctuary is its ability to welcome guests without the whole structure being shaken–a fine balance. This balancing act teaches us that real community is an inclusive rather than an exclusive step.

I particularly like the notion that a sanctuary is as strong as its ability to welcome guests–not novice monks (who come with the aim of adapting to the rules) or friends (who you love because you already know them and so you suspend your normal way of living while they visit you), but guests. They may never come again, or want to adapt to your way of life, but the point is that when they come to you they do not feel as though they are in the way, and you do not feel that your life has been fundamentally disrupted.

How many of us can say, in any aspect of our daily lives, that we can simply welcome others into our lives, our conversations or our projects, without being derailed, without needing to make elaborate plans in advance to accommodate them or simply being inhospitable to them? If you have been staying with family over Christmas, or having friends stay in your home, you might have an especially clear insight into this right now.

I think it could be helpful, then, to think of writing as a scene of hospitality. It is my responsibility to set that scene in some recognizably hospitable ways–providing sustenance, light or simply a space of reflection–that allow the reader to take what he or she needs. It isn’t about befriending everyone through my writing, or only speaking to those who already understand the rules, but about setting a place for anyone who wants to visit, however briefly.

 

‘We demand truth as we would a piece of chocolate’: A Review of ‘True Perception’ by Chögyam Trungpa (Long Post)

True Perception, Chögyam Trungpa’s collection of talks about art and dharma from the 1970s and 80s, begins with this intriguing claim:

The basic problem in artistic endeavour is the tendency to split the artist from the audience and then try to send a message from one to the other. When this happens, art becomes exhibitionism. ….

In meditative art, the artist embodies the viewer as well as the creator of the works. Vision is not separate from operation, and there is no fear of being clumsy or failing to achieve his aspiration (1).

If you have ever struggled with a blank page or an empty dance floor, you can recognize what Trungpa Rinpoche is talking about here. Most of the time when we sit down to make something that is going to go out into the world we think of it as a distance to cover, ‘how will I make them understand this’ or ‘why won’t this take the form that I want it to have’?

Most books that draw on meditation and Buddhist philosophy, one or two of which I have written about before on this blog, confine themselves to advising us to use meditation as a means of calming the mind before writing. If you just settle your mind down and get out of your own way, you’ll be able to write that profound, literary novel or create the moving  screenplay. Trungpa’s book, however, is not about settling us down. Instead, it is about cutting through our habitual way of seeing creating and creativity.

An instance of dharma art (still from the 2010 film “Poetry” by Lee Chang-dong)

As with all of Trungpa’s writings, habitual refers to our shared human habits–seeing ourselves as separate from the world, resisting what we don’t like about our lives, and accumulating achievements so that we can give our lives an apparently fixed value. In that respect, you don’t have to be a Buddhist or practice meditation to understand those problems or to benefit from the advice in the book. For example, throughout the talks Rinpoche emphasizes the importance of not separating our artistic mind from our everyday life, such as thinking ‘my writing is so important that I don’t have time to make my bed/vacuum the hallway/take the kitchen scraps out to the compost bin’. By training ourselves to relate with every ordinary moment that we have in front of us we become better at seeing clearly, without either aggression or desire. When we have trained ourselves to deal with everything that comes our way just as it is, we hone our ability to see, and thus our ability to make art.

The most thought-provoking aspects of the book for me, however, come precisely from the Buddhist philosophy and practices that encourage us to make art from different premises, as well as for different purposes, than art is usually made in the West. Whether this is a thorough-going philosophical difference is a difficult question to answer because Western aesthetic theory and practice has also been shaped by spiritual and ethical traditions. Since the Enlightenment, however, the special privilege given to the artist as a unique (possibly superior) individual–as well as the capitalist modes in which most art circulates–has eroded much of the spiritual orientation to making art. True Perception is grounded in the idea that art is not about the artist, not in the sense that we most commonly understand what an artist is and does. In other words, art is neither about exhibiting ourselves nor expressing our individualism. To think of art in this way is a kind of aggression in which we try to make the world and ourselves into something we want it to be, rather than seeing clearly what it is. However, if the artist is not here to say ‘look at the world my way (instead of your way/the normal way)’ then what is art, and what is it for? This question becomes even more confusing when you realize that contrary to expectations, Buddhist psychology acknowledges that each human being is a singular being. If I do have a unique existence, a particular, conditioned mind and an embodied existence, but art is not simply about expressing how I see/think/feel/do things, what can it be?

Dharma art in practice (A 35mm slide by Chögyam Trungpa, reproduced in True Perception)

There is no straightforward answer to this, either in theory or practice. One way of investigating it is to study the illustrations in the book, which are examples of Chögyam Trungpa’s own art (including calligraphy, photographs and ikebana arrangements). The effect of looking at the photographs is interesting because at first they seem wrong. They don’t focus on the things you might expect them to focus on, and they aren’t framed in the right way. You wonder what you are looking at because the photograph isn’t telling you what to think about what you see. Usually, we look in the way we have been invited to look. It takes considerable artistic discipline to allow the viewer or reader to see the thing in their own way, without–as Trungpa writes–providing them with too much information about how you, the artist, see it. The artist’s role here is to see, to make that moment of seeing available to others and, most importantly, to allow them through that to do their own seeing. In this way, artist and audience are participating together in seeing the world, and the separation mentioned in the opening quote disappears quite naturally.

To think of art as a means of inviting others to do their own seeing–rather than to admire how you, the artist, see the world–is revolutionary. Seen in this way, the artist does not possess some esoteric ability that is inaccessible to others, but is someone who can create opportunities for us to practice seeing the world free from attitudes of aggression (I want it be otherwise); ignorance (I am not interested in dealing with this); or craving (I want it to be like this always). True Perception therefore opens a very important discussion about the importance of art not only as a form of meditation, but ultimately as a way of creating enlightened society in the secular, Shambhala tradition. In the last and most philosophically rich essays of the book, ‘Joining Heaven and Earth’ Rinpoche writes with a dark seriousness that we must not think of art as some kind of entertaining distraction from life, something we use to exhibit our narrow views or to encourage others to further cultivate theirs. Instead, it is a profound means of helping all of us–artist and audience–to see clearly and peacefully what is going on in front of our eyes right now.

Perhaps the most compelling instance of what Trungpa describes in his book that I’ve seen in recent years is Lee Chang-dong’s 2010 film Poetry.  The film begins by showing us the life of Mi-ja, an older Korean woman who signs up to a poetry class. Mi-ja’s life is full of ordinary and extraordinary pain–she is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and is single-handedly raising a grandson whom she finds out has participated in a brutal gang-rape, all while struggling to make ends meet. As she learns to write poetry, her vision becomes much sharper and more gentle at the same time. She loves her grandson, but she brings herself to look his crime–and his apparent lack of remorse over it–in its full, banal horror. At the same time, in moments of intense conflict and anxiety, she is still able to appreciate the texture of what is going on around her in the natural world, such as the taste of a peach or the sight of a flower in full bloom.

Chang-dong’s film doesn’t make any judgments about whether Mi-ja is getting things right. Quite a lot of the time the camera simply gives us a shot of  Mi-Ja looking at her world and we have to do the work of looking too. In this way, the film closes the gap between artist and audience and the experience of watching the film becomes a meditation. There is no triumph, or resolution, but there is integrity of vision. The result, as True Perception urges, is that we can look as clearly at a loved one’s implication in a gang-rape as we can a beautiful flower. From this perspective, art is not about truth or beauty, both of which can simply be conceptual alibis for shaping the world into what we want it and need it to be. (And I might add, reversing this and thinking of lies and ugliness as ‘reality’, is just the other side of the same coin.)

We are passionately attached to our idea of art as truth and beauty, to our ‘chocolate’, as Trungpa astutely expresses it metaphorically, but actually the world is a much more interesting place than this. Perhaps, as we all did when we were toddlers, we can learn again to taste other things. As well as chocolate, let us take plastic toys, paper or our own fingers into our mouths with a gentle curiosity about how they feel rather than an obsession with whether they are proper and tasty things to eat.

** If you have made it all the way to the end of the post I want to thank you because it is a long one. I am always interested to hear what people think about the ideas I put out in the blog, but if you’ve taken the time to read this post I’d be particularly interested to hear your thoughts. Thanks again!**

 

Seeing and Believing

“When we see something, we don’t have to believe in it, but we do have to see it properly. We have to look at it–then it might be true.”

Chögyam Trungpa