The siege of the mosque continues. Many of the fundos have surrendered, lured by the offer of 5,000 Rs. One of the leaders has tried to escape dressed in a burqa. What gave him away? His pot-belly. I kid thee not! Anyway, the sight of all these savages reminds me of a scene from Planet of the Apes.
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Never been able to understand this devotion to 'the flag'. Yesterday, an old uncle tells me of how Jinnah recommended that the Sikhs set up their own independent State or at least join Pakistan. Look at our flag, the green part is for the Muslims but the white boarder represents a space for minorities. "What do you say?"
To which the Sikh replied, "And what about the pole that will be stuck up our backsides"
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The Pakistani law minister (Fed. level) was quite peeved that a journalist had written that he could catch terrorists/criminals quite easily because of the 'long arm of the law'. As chance would have it he came across this journalist in a radio interview a few weeks later. Sensing his chance to get even with her he laid into her: "the long arm to you..the long arm on your mother, the long arm on your father"
No, minister, it's just an expression.
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Things are going to slide, slide in all directions
Won't be nothing
Nothing you can measure any more
the blizzard, the blizzard of the world
has crossed the threshold
and it has overturned
the order of the soul.
(Leonard Cohen)
The opposite of a proper order is, perhaps, an infernal order. Or maybe it is the lack of order, the endless succession of moments that have no coherence, no relation to anything that has previously happened and, therefore, no meaning(Casino Culture, Steiner).
Without a true order there is chaos. But since we cannot accept discontinuity we impose our own, man-made order on things.
Fragmenting Times. Fragmenting Time.
Our fascination and deep revulsion for authoritative voices. Authority, legitimacy amuses us (is something that can be mocked) and yet, at the same time, we dimly perceive that its origins are shrouded in mystery: the unconditioned. Our response to a lack of stability is to -re-create (never discover!) through matter what he have lost in spirit; our craving for solidity in a floating world, gravitas in an unbearably light world, our 'ontological thirst' (Eliade) for being, our fear of contingency,the transitory. Is this not akin to the search for order and conformity of the rootless, the alienated?
The more we live in pure succession, in time, the more we need to stabilise ourselves with forms that resist time (painting, architecture). An army of experts, scientific laws, the administration of things, the vast memory museums (libraries, 'from the archives,' genome projects), leisure ("organized freedom"), culture industries. The great paradox, the more man has struggled to free himself from the unconditioned, the more he has become enmeshed in a vast system (matrix?) of his own making. We live in a gnostic age. And as time goes by we have not lost any of our inclinations for ritual and repetition...
From Walter Benjamin, Illuminations:
'Comfort isolates; on the other hand, it brings those enjoying it closer to mechanization'
'The unskilled worker's work has been sealed off from experience; practice counts for nothing there.'
'His [Poe's] text makes us understand the true connection between wildness and discipline. His pedestrians act as if they had adapted themselves to the machines and could express themselves only automatically.'
'Gambling gives short shrift to the weighty past on which work bases itself...The work of the unskilled worker does not lack the futility, the emptiness, the inability to complete something which is inherent in the activity of the wage slave in a factory.' Working at a machine or gambling is 'devoid of substance' because it is cut off from previous acts.
'The mechanism to which the participants in a game of chance entrust themselves seizes them body and soul, so that even in their private sphere, and no matter how agitated they may be, they are capable only of a reflex action. '
'Gambling becomes a stock diversion of the bourgeoisie only in the 19th century.'
'The antithesis of time in hell , the province of those who are not allowed to complete anything they have started...On the boulevards it was customary to attribute everything to chance. This disposition is promoted by betting, which is a device for giving events the character of a shock, detaching them form the context of experience.'
'A series of lucky coups gives me more pleasure than a non-gambler can have in years..I live a hundred lives in one.'
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3 comments:
Very interesting.
So, well what I think marechera might be doing (and what I know Bataille is doing) is trying to make us aware of the ways in which we falsely stabilise things. I do see that a lot of how we tend to do this can be gauged by analysing readers tend to approach black sunlight. I see some who claim to have understood it, but what they then talk about is identity politics -- which, so far as I can tell, does not enter this book very much; at least not in the conventional sense. Others talk about it, but you get the sense that they are actually distancing themselves from what they've read. It's like they've experienced the reading as relating something "out there" rather than affecting them "in here". And so on.
So, anyway, are you from Pakistan?
Unsane, I like what you say about "falsely" stabilising things ..since it suggests that there is true way: "love stilleth the will". A dear friend gave me a book ('A London Child of the 1870's'). What I like about it was the line , or the sentiment, that we'd look back on the bourgeois world of stability and its chraming objects with some degree of nostalgia, as if it and they were a raft in a turbulent sea.
Simone Weil was absolutely right, in my opinion, about the need for 'brdiges' :
'No human being should be deprived of his 'metaux', that is to say of those relative and mixed blessings (home, country, traditions, culture etc.)which warm and nourish the soul and without which, short of sainthood, a "human" life is not possible.'
From Pakistan. Sort of. Originally?As Carol Ann Duffy says in her poem.
HI Billo
I have, most unfortunately, been deprived of all those things, so my experiences have always been a little naked and extreme. I have learned not to yearn for stability because it is so unavailable to me. What I would still desire is a large track of land and some horses.
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