Samir Chopra's Blog, page 95

Facebook and Impoverished Sharing

A few days ago, on this blog, I excerpted a couple of passages from Richard Klein‘s Cigarettes are Sublime, and wrote of a little episode in my life centered on smoking cigarettes as a way to kill time.  Once I had written the post and published it here, as is usual, I posted links to it on my Twitter feed and my Facebook page. As I did so, I wondered if I should tag the friend of mine who had gifted me the book almost twenty years ago–he is on Facebook too, just like me. My tagging of him would be a kind of public acknowledgment of his gift, maybe even a late thank-you to add to the one I sent his way when he first gave me my birthday gift. Perhaps I could tag him in the comments space, writing something like:

Hey D___: remember you bought me this book for my birthday in 1995? Well, I’ve read it – nineteen years later!

I didn’t do so but I’m still tempted to–somehow it seemed like the ‘reasonable’ thing to do on Facebook. For such tagging, such calling-out, is eminently the norm on Facebook.  If you post something on your Timeline, and if any of your friends is somehow potentially interested in–or, as in my case–connected somehow–to the subject of your post, well, then, you tag them, you alert them–you ‘share’, you ‘link’, you ‘network.’ Of course, when you do so, you do so publicly.

In an alternative universe, I might have written my blog post, and then separately emailed my friend to let him know that I had finally reached up into my bookshelf, read his witty inscription, and read the birthday gift he had so generously purchased for me (on a graduate student’s salary, no less). That epistolary interaction might have turned into a longer one if he had replied, perhaps with a reminiscence or two about that period of genteel semi-poverty, perhaps with a rueful acknowledgment of how long cigarettes had been a presence in our lives. If I had done my tagging on Facebook, we might have had the same interaction but in public, not in private. Its content, which we might have imagined more appropriate for email, would have been visible to all our ‘friends.’  Or perhaps we might not have had the same conversation; perhaps we would have found an unhappy middle-ground where, subconsciously aware of our ‘audience’ we would have made our exchanges less revealing, less forthcoming. And yet still remained in the public eye, not moving our correspondence to email.

The structure and features of Facebook are–as I’ve noted here previously–set up to shift a great deal of communication, previously imagined to be private, to public spaces, available for inspection by your ‘friends’, all in the name of sharing. Its impact on privacy is much talked about; one of the dimensions of that impact is how we may subscribe to its sharing model while retaining some of our intuitions about what we consider shareworthy, thus impoverishing our interactions with our ‘friends.’

Walking in Sydney: From Beach to Campus (And Back)

I like writing about walking–to work, and around New York City, for instance–on these pages. I like walking through new cities, for it remains the best way–at the right remove–to experience their offerings. One walk that combined commuting with exploration was one I undertook, sporadically, for a few months, in Sydney, Australia, while living in Bondi Beach and working on a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of New South Wales in Randwick.

My normal commute to work was by bus: I rode any one of a number of buses to Bondi Junction, and then transferred to the 400, which dropped me off at university. I soon tired of waiting at bus-stands for buses that didn’t offer me a seat; I tired too of the hassle of a transfer. I realized, quickly enough, that Sydney–situated in a particularly salubrious temperate latitude–had gorgeous weather aplenty that was simply going to waste by my riding in buses; I should walk instead.

A quick calculation with maps showed the most direct route–Bondi Road to Council Street to Carrington Road to Frenchman’s Road to Avoca Street to the university entrance on High Street–would take some fifty minutes. If I left home at 8AM as I usually did, I would arrive at my desk at about the same time as I did when I rode in by bus.  And in the evenings, I would be back home by six.

My walks, of course, soon became much more than simple commutes. I had moved to Australia from the US and left many friends–including a long-distance girlfriend–behind; I was in an uncertain phase of my life as far as my career was concerned; walking each day for close to an hour on each leg of my work commute gave me ample time to think about emotional crises, intellectual anxieties, and to endlessly, and fruitlessly at times, examine and speculate about my many insecurities in both the personal and professional domains. I would be lying if I suggested that my walks were merely taken up by a leisurely examination of whichever problem in the logical modeling of human reasoning I was working on in those days.

But I was in Sydney, and Sydney is a beautiful city. I could take small detours–visiting the many beaches that lay on my way back home–to explore more of its offerings and I often did. Sydney’s light in the evenings was golden;  the eastern suburbs I was walking through were framed at their prettiest by its rays. Sometimes, storms would threaten, and then, I would be treated to dazzling sunsets–the most colorful manifestation possible of the seemingly mundane phenomena of the scattering of light,  to ominous clouds and to deep, persistent rolls of thunder. Somehow, I felt reluctant to hurry up and seek shelter, sensing that even more spectacular visions were soon to be available if I could brave a soaking to the skin.  And then, of course, in the evenings, on my return home, as I walked down Bondi Road, there was the first sight of the breakers of the mighty Pacific, rolling in relentlessly against Bondi’s crescent-shaped sands.

It wouldn’t have looked the same from a seat in the bus.

Cigarettes and the Killing (of Time)

In Cigarettes are Sublime (Duke University Press, 1993) Richard Klein writes:

The cigarette kills time, chronometric time, the stark mechanical measure of mortality….The series of moments the clock records is not only a succession of “nows” but a memento mori diminishing the number of seconds that remain before death. But the cigarette interrupts and reverses the decline, accomplishes a little revolution in time by seeming to install, however briefly, a time outside itself….Smoking cigarettes…is permanently linked to the idea of suspending the passage of ordinary time and instituting some other, more penetrating one, in conditions of luxuriating indifference and resignation toward which a poetic sensibility feels irresistible attraction….The moment of taking a cigarette allows one to open a parenthesis in the time of ordinary experience, a space and time of heightened attention that gives rise to a feeling of transcendence, evoked through the ritual of fire, smoke, cinder connecting hand, lungs, breath and mouth. It procures a little rush of infinity that alters perspectives , however  slightly, and permits, albeit briefly, an ecstatic standing outside of oneself.

Klein’s book, as the passages excerpted above may lead us to surmise, is entertainingly whimsical in terms of the claims it makes on behalf of cigarettes. As someone who smoked the damn things on and off, for almost twenty years before giving them up, I can testify to their power to influence the nature of temporal experience, perhaps by virtue of that powerful alkaloid, nicotine, that they send coursing into our lungs and bloodstream, perhaps by virtue of the visual entertainment the bluish-gray smoke we inhale and exhale provides.

In 1993, the year Klein’s book was published, I rented, for a month, a room in an under-renovation building in Newark. I shared the top floor with another tenant; the staircase that ran up to our rooms lacked a banister, so a climb up to my lodgings always provided a little frisson of daring adventure (especially when the building was, late at night, unlit and dark, and I was not eager to awaken my notoriously cranky landlord.)

It was August, and my room lacked a fan or an air-conditioner. I was too broke to buy either, and resigned myself to trying to sleep–on the couch that served as bed–with an open window as the only source of cooling air.  Sleep, in that stifling room, that miserable building, that desolate neighborhood, did not come easily. I had no internet connection with which to while away the time, no phone line with which to call friends. (And who would have wanted to talk to an insomniac in the middle of the night anyway?)

But I had cigarettes. So night after night, once I had had dinner and done all the reading I could, I would sit by my open window, lighting and smoking one cigarette after the other, idly watching my exhaled smoke drift out of my room, sneaking up along the walls of the building and finally dissipating outside in the warm. humid night.

Sleep came late; the only reason I had stopped caring about its exact hour was because I had cigarettes for company.

Notes From Sick Bay

I am a sick man. But I’m not particularly spiteful. However, my sickness does make me an unattractive man. I do not think my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don’t consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors.

Ok, well, enough of rewriting Notes from the Underground. The point in any case is that I’m sick–with a cold, sore throat, cough, the sniffles and runs, a fever and a body ache. Overnight, a seemingly minor affliction has turned into a raging monster. Of sorts. There is something fin du monde about being sick at night, especially if you are suffering from a congested upper passage that makes it feel like you can’t breathe: your throat becomes drier even as your eyes continue to water, a body ache grips your being and undermines it from the inside like a corporeal quisling, and the fever makes you, er, feverish.

So no writing today. Instead: lots of naps (what a pleasure the extended daytime variety is!), some light reading (when my eyes weren’t hurting), both in bed. Some soup; an apple; some ginger-and-honey tea; one black coffee in the morning.

A sparse day. Hopefully, good health, which seemed like a distant mirage today, will return tomorrow. I look forward to throwing off–bathed in sweat–my blankets tonight, a sign that the fever will have broken.

Till then, back to the sniffles, the self-medication, the lozenges, the shakes and shivers.

Blood Meridian and The Nature of the Universe

Yesterday’s post, in which I excerpted a couple of passages from Samuel Delany channeling Foucault, is followed today by two excerpts from Cormac McCarthy‘s Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West (Vintage International, New York, 1992). I’m going to call these ‘theological’ in nature. (The entire novel, I realize, may be termed a kind of theology.)

First, the judge speaks to us about the ways and manners of God’s speaking and how traces may be found, read and heard in the world around us:

[T]he judge took one of the packanimals and emptied out the panniers and went off to explore the works. In the afternoon he sat in the compound breaking ore samples with a hammer, the feldspar rich in red oxide of copper and native nuggets in whose organic lobations he purported to read news of the earth’s origins, holding an extemporary lecture in geology to a small gathering who nodded and spat. A few would quote him scripture to confound his ordering up of eons out of the ancient chaos and other apostate supposings. The judge smiled.

Books lie, he said.

God don’t lie.

No, said the judge. He does not. And these are his words.

He held up a chunk of rock.

He speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things.

As the judge’s investigations–careful and systematic and thoughtful–suggest, this reading and hearing is a form of diligent study; God’s ‘words’ are not written in the most straightforward fashion and may require some decipherment.

Second, a passage–again featuring the judge–that suggests the universe is a little less comprehensible than the first claim might have indicated:

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a muddled field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.

These lines suggest a universe our understanding of which is necessarily limited; our best theories of it rest on assumptions about its comprehensibility and uniformity that are unjustified. We are especially hamstrung in our efforts to comprehend the universe because the very tools we use for its study–our mind included–are themselves part of it, and thus always subject to the mysteries and vagaries that self-reference creates.

Samuel Delany on Power

I have finally taken down, from my shelves, my long-ago-borrowed copy of Samuel Delany‘s Tales of Nevèrÿon (Bantam Books, New York, 1979) and started reading it. Almost immediately, in the first story of Gorgik, the mine slave taken “as a plaything to Nevèrÿon’s imperial court” (‘The Tale of Gorgik‘), I came up on the following Foucauldian ruminations on the nature of power – as evident in the imperial court:

The social hierarchy and patterns of deference to be learned here were as complex as those had to be mastered–even by a foreman–on moving into a new slave barracks in the mine….Indeed, among slaves Gorgik knew what generated such complexity: Servitude itself. The only question he could not answer here was: What were all these elegant lords and ladies slaves to?….The answer was simple: Power, pure, raw, and obsessive. But in his ignorance, young Gorgik was again closer to the lords and ladies around him than an equally young potters’ boy would have been. For it is precisely at its center that one loses the clear vision of what surrounds, what controls and contours every utterance, decides and develops every action, as the bird has no clear concept of air, though it supports her every turn, or the fish no true vision of water, though it blur all she sees. A goodly, if not frightening, number of these same lords and ladies dwelling at the court has as little idea of what shaped their every willed decision, conventional observance, and sheer, unthinking habit, as did Gorgik. [pp. 24-25]

Gorgik….was, for all his unfocused thought, learning–still learning. He was learning that power–the great power that shattered lives and twisted the course of nations–was like a fog over a meadow at evening. From any distance, it seemed to have a shape, a substance, a color, an edge, yet as you approached it, it seemed to receded before you. Finally, when common sense said you were at its center, it still seemed just as far away, only by this time it was on all sides, obscuring any vision of the world beyond it. [pp. 37]

Here, especially in the analogies drawn with the fish, the bird and the fog, Delany captures some key aspects of Foucault’s theorizing about imposed power: its opacity, its ubiquity, its invisibility to those controlled by it. And it is precisely at its ‘center’ that this all-controlling power is the least visible.  And Delany is wise too, in his description of what is affected most by power: “willed decision, conventional observance, and sheer, unthinking habit” – the building blocks of our selves. The first is a key component in our ascriptions of agency to ourselves, the second and third play key explanatory roles in our self-understanding, especially as most of us are too lazy to do the historical investigation required to discover the foundational underpinnings of our actions.

Note: These observations are also very good, literary descriptions of Bourdieu‘s fields of power: “[A] system of social positions…structured internally in terms of power relationships…a social arena of struggle”.

Writing, the Beating of Metal, and Self-Transformation

I have been greedily raiding Divisadero‘s stores for little gems to excerpt here. But with writing that lovely and illuminating, there is little cause for shame. So once again:

Sometimes truth is too buried for adults, it can be found only in hours of rewritings during the night, the way metal is beaten into fineness.

I like this description of ‘hours of rewriting’ and the comparison with ‘the way metal is beaten into fineness.’ I like the invocation of the malleability and ductility of metal for a simple reason: we think of metal as hard, shiny, resistant, an archetype of unbending resistance, the epitome of heaviness; it always sinks, always hurts when it makes contact with soft, resistant flesh. In forming these associations, we forget the science lessons that introduced us to the systematic study of metals: when we were informed of metals’ distinctive physical properties in the domain of ‘solids’, that metal could be turned into wires and films, into shapes of our wildest imaginings. The way in which that was done, by repeated hammerings and drawings out, by all manners of tools, also introduced us to the notion of metal as transformable, as flexible. Metals belied expectations in many ways: they weren’t liquids, but would flow when subjected to the right temperatures; they were hard but not undeformably rigid; they gave a little, if you pushed a lot; if you persisted, you could turn it into wafer thin coverings, like those films of silver used to cover Indian sweets.

For many reasons, the comparison of the beating of metals into fineness with the process of rewriting is a good one. We think of our written words as cast in stone, as impervious, they resist our sternest imprecations to magically read better, to be better than they are. But we need to change them, to transform them, to not be put off by their seemingly metallic nature. Sometimes I describe the act of persistent rewriting as a ‘massaging’ but that description does not work as well as Ondaatje‘s does. The ‘massaging’ speaks of a caress, a gentle moulding; the beating into fineness summons up better the imposition of will that a determined rewrite or deep, sustained, judicious edit demands.

Lastly, the bit that begins that sentence above: self-discovery and transformation, the digging up of archival materials left untouched for too long by those who have grown up, takes attention, work, persistence and diligence; it can be aided and accomplished by writing, by bringing it forth. Much like the ‘beating into fineness’ of the metal produces an entirely new shape, look, and feel, the act of persevering at writing can, by steadily dredging up the subterranean, produce a new self.

So writing is not just productive of the written word, it can also make a new self. And just like the metal was previously imagined to be cast in the mold that had first produced it and yet somehow, transformed, we might find more flexibility, more wiggle room for maneuver than we might have imagined.

A Bodily Memory, Re-Evoked

Today, after a several-month-long gap thanks to my sabbatical leave, I am ensconced again in my university campus office. (I made the trip in today to meet a doctoral student and to attend to some bureaucratic matters.) My journey to campus–a half-hour walk as usual, preceded by dropping off my daughter at daycare–was uneventful, reminding me of the many times I have traversed the pleasant neighborhoods that intervene between my home and the college main entrance.

On arriving at campus, I went through a slightly modified arrival routine: because I had arrived early, the department office was still not open for business, so I made a trip to the library cafe to pick up a coffee that would ease me into the day’s work. That done, I headed to my office. As I unlocked the door, I noticed an old, familiar sensation return: the key to the lock does not fit exactly on the first insertion and requires just a tiny juggle. Which I provided. As I have many, many times before.

Till that point in time, my return to campus had been entirely unremarkable: its sights–the students, the quadrangle, the security guards, the buildings–and sounds–classes in session, students talking on cellphones in hallways–were familiar enough, as they should be for a place where I’ve now spent a fair percentage of the last twelve years. None of them stirred me though, in the way that the bodily sensation of the not-quite-fitting key did. It was a memory all right, but an embodied one, a feeling within me that had lain dormant and been evoked by the right kind of interaction with the environment ‘outside.’

Memories can evidently be of many kinds. Sometimes we see a familiar face and feel an emotion stir within us; we are thus able to summon up the appropriate facial responses when we meet an old friend. On other occasions, a sound may remind us of a time in our lives–one accompanied by a mood, a mental sensation; we are able to experience a musically accompanied nostalgia.

And then, there are remembrances like the one I experienced today: a particular bodily configuration, an action that orients me in a very particular way with external impresses, that summons up long-practiced and experienced responses to the world’s affordances.

We carry the traces of our physical relationships with the world with us: in the way we walk, run, use our hands, eat, drink, and sleep. Our bodily gestures and mannerisms are well-practiced ones, honed by hours, days, weeks, months of persistent, hands-on movements. Sometimes the external evocations go away–as they did in my case when I had no occasion to unlock my office door–and then, like today, they return. When they do, we suddenly come into contact with a past self, one wrapped up in my corporeal layers, ready to spring into action. Anyone riding a long-ago-learned bike after an extended hiatus is familiar with this sensation in the most visceral of ways.

We are not disembodied minds, but embodied ones.

An “Orphan’s Sense of History”

Today I plunder Divisadero again, for a personal note:

Those who have an orphan’s sense of history love history. And my voice has become that of an orphan. Perhaps it was the unknown life of my mother, her barely drawn portrait, that made me an archivist, a historian. Because if you do not plunder the past, the absence feeds on you.

Technically, despite my parents not being alive any more, I’m not an orphan, or even an adult orphan:

An orphan (from the Greek ὀρφανός orfanos) is a child whose parents are dead or have abandoned them permanently. In common usage, only a child who has lost both parents is called an orphan. When referring to animals, only the mother’s condition is usually relevant. If she has gone, the offspring is an orphan, regardless of the father’s condition.

Adults can also be referred to as orphans, or adult orphans. However, survivors who reached adulthood before their parents died are normally not called orphans. It is a term generally reserved for children whose parents have died while they are too young to support themselves. [citations removed]

But I do think I might have “an orphan’s sense of history.” I “love history”; I feel that if I “do not plunder the past” its “absence” will “feed” on me. It’s the presence of the “unknown lives” that does it: those of my parents and the imagined ones I ‘left behind’ when I immigrated. Lost parents plus immigration equals gaping gaps, waiting to be filled in, demanding it.

You get to work in any way you see fit. There are photos–digital and otherwise, scrapbooks, email archives, handwritten notes, post-its, letters, postcards, book inscriptions, New Years and Christmas greeting cards, wedding invitations, baby announcements; you save them all. You have boxes and albums of photos; you have hard drives. You have boxes of letters; you have hard drives. In these collections you are distinguished only by your predilection for the minor, the obscure. You see stories in all manners of things; I see a narrative envelop my correspondences, my photos, my writings.

You dig, you seek, you fish, you trawl; your need becomes visible. For many years, when I would meet someone who had known my father, I would be told stories about him without my asking. I did not need to ask; I might have hesitated, but my curiosity was plain for all to see. Even those that didn’t know him helped me fill out a picture of times and places I had had little access to.  Sometimes, I was bolder; I would be overt and inquire pointedly. Over time I tired; there was only so much I rely on the record of others. Over the years, I’ve been defeated by the task; I can’t find out any more about him, all the little snippets and nuggets don’t help any more, his friends have also passed away.

Perhaps I’ll have to rely on fantasy someday, write ‘The Autobiography of my Father’, a gigantic daydream put to paper. You fill the absence in any way that works.

The Post-Apocalyptic Famine

A couple of days ago, I viewed Tim Fehlbaum’s directorial debut Hell, which “tells the story of a group of survivors in post-apocalyptic Germany in the year 2016, when solar flares have destroyed the earth’s atmosphere and temperatures have risen by 10°C.” As my posts here on The Walking Dead and The Road would indicate, I often find my mind wandering to cheerful thoughts of post-apocalyptic times. One of my dominant obsessions in this domain–as it appears to be of the productions just named–is food, or rather, the lack of it.

Here is an excerpt from a post I wrote in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy:

Somehow, through this all, the most unsettling image yet was [of] a row of empty food shelves at a coffee shop; on asking the barista why their normal snack offerings were not available, I was told it was because the usual deliveries were not being made by trucks.  At that moment, again, I became aware I lived on an island, one serviced by road and train connections to the ‘rest of the world,’ that bridges and tunnels were still lifelines for it, that most connections between its points occur in relatively mundane, non-glamorous, and as Sandy showed, eminently disruptable ways. It was at that moment too, that the fragility and contingency of our existence here became just a little clearer; I was reminded again of the logistical connections, of the coordinated work of hundreds and thousands of men and women that keeps everything  ’normal’ on a day to basis: those trucks that make deliveries day and night, the gas that keeps them running (and that heats our buildings). All those supermarket shelves–normally bursting to the seams with packaged goods and produce efficiently delivered from afar–would rapidly empty, if the gas-tunnel-truck disruption continued. (For remember: we live on an island, we don’t grow our food around here.) This city is only able to play home to ten million people because a vast interdependent network of supply chains lets it do so.

The vast majority of us do not grow or produce our own food; we buy it from stores, which are supplied by a vast transportation network, in turn supplied by a vast manufacturing network (dependent on other networks of supply and manufacture and so on). When the apocalypse strikes, the first thing to go will be these two networks: those who man them will be incapacitated, production lines will break down, deliveries will cease. In response, panicky runs on the remaining food supply will begin, as will hoarding. Violent clashes for food will be inevitable; these will continue as it will become increasingly evident that no more supplies are forthcoming. And because fuel will be in short supply too, looking for food will become extremely difficult. Cities will rapidly become dying–and killing–zones.

The resultant desperate situation is, I think, only dimly grasped; the cannibalism that is a recurrent feature of modern takes on the post-apocalypse is a grim acknowledgment of it. (The Walking Dead comics feature it; the television show has not done so yet.) The shortage of food and the ensuing mass starvation will almost certainly be the grimmest–and least ennobling–aspect of the disaster that our modern culture seems to spend so much time speculating about.