NĀḌĪ

to flow like water, as it finds the path of least resistance and nourishes everything in its path

Notes

A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

                                                                                                                      Albert Einstein

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"The Power of the Powerless"

mills:

My friend Stuart Carlton —who writes here and at Wings of Reason— took the time to clean up and post a copy of Vaclav Havel’s essay “The Power of the Powerless,” which is otherwise a bit hard to track down online.

Havel, who died on Sunday, was a surprisingly human figure for a man so heroic and transformative; he seemed, despite suffering imprisonment and terror after the attempted cultural annihilation of his country by the Soviet Union, never to lose the spark of humor and felicity that made him an artist. He witnessed real horror, fought against real evil at a time when the odds were long, yet retained the charming and creative attitude of the optimist, as a child of the Enlightenment should.

Though he started as a playwright and rebellious intellectual and became, after decades of uncertainty, the president of a reborn Czechoslovakia, his was not a transformation in the traditional sense; he never stopped being an Enlightenment thinker, an artist, an heir to what his friend Milan Kundera called the culture of the novel: that world which sees the highest morality in resisting reductive moral judgment in favor of comprehension.

It is perhaps hard for people to believe today the incredible, total faith humans had until recently in political solutions to human problems, or perhaps it isn’t; it is impossible to imagine, however, a man of Havel’s unconventional and literary bent becoming the leader of a country. But countries in East Central Europe, Kundera has argued, are more aware of the value of Western humanism because they’ve been recently deprived of it by both Germany and the Soviet Union. They value the artist, in other words, because they have seen how essential art, and the liberal arts in general, are to a civilization, how bleak a society without them is. (The rest of us will learn someday).

In any event: while parts of the essay have aged, much of it remains bracingly clear, profound, enduring:

Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them. As the repository of something ‘supra-personal’ and objective, it enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true position and their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves. It is a very pragmatic, but at the same time an apparently dignified, way of legitimising what is above, below, and on either side. It is directed towards people and towards God. It is a veil behind which human beings can hide their own ‘fallen existence’, their trivialization, and their adaptation to the status quo. It is an excuse that everyone can use, from the greengrocer, who conceals his fear of losing his job behind an alleged interest in the unification of the workers of the world, to the highest functionary, whose interest in staying in power can be cloaked in phrases about service to the working class. The primary excusatory function of ideology, therefore, is to provide people, both as victims and pillars of the post-totalitarian system, with the illusion that the system is in harmony with the human order and the order of the universe.

There are excellent obituaries in both The New York Times and The Economist.

Notes

Hitchens

A few years ago in an effort to still religious unrest in the south, the government of Thailand littered its land with thousands of origami peace birds.  Whether this actually happened, I have no idea.  Nor do I imagine that the warring has ceased.  Still, when I wonder about death, this lovely gesture comes to mind.  Discovering the meaning of death or its preceding life is difficult for those who understand how utterly illogical is the concept of heaven.  My mania stems from vain efforts to figure it out or to decide what I believe in.  But in any case, I am calmed by simple truths.  That by some miracle, I am alive.  That I deep inside I feel the people around me.  That Philadelphia is composed of ghosts.  That some beings pleasant little hands folded those birds. That energy is neither created nor destroyed. 

I wonder if the gesture of death is not unlike the birds.  A littering upon the land of vibration, reverberation from which those plugged in to the source feed.  Eyes open wide, we gather as many birds as our hands can hold and trudge forward.   Inspired. 

If in fact he believed in nothing, Hitchens might find these thoughts infuriating or laughable.  They are both.  In a doctor’s waiting room last week, I stumbled upon an article about the respective powers of optimism and pessimism.  Said the article, by approaching all matters with an expectation of cataclysm, the pessimist sets him/herself up for the pleasure of surprise unavailable to others.  It may then follow that Hitchens is in for a beautiful coup de theatre. 

Somehow 12 plus 15 plus 11 equals eleven.  Eleven has something to do with being visionary.  Of course, 2011 has also been a shitty shitty year. 

Notes

Dam Libs 1

Today was the loveliest day ever. Joey and I were flowing down the mural and saw a bridge envisioning a flood.  When we finally made it to Joey’s house, we saw the door was illustrious. When we walked into the house, his mom was captivating with a crowd.  That’s when we saw an alligator in the pool occupying with Isadora Duncan.  It was too much.  Joey and I had to dance. 

The summer was a difficult one.  The weather was strange and they could not muster one day of pure unadulterated sunshine.  She cried.  Oh, she cried.  Could not get the salt out of her eyes.  And he, in his tough manly skin, pulled a wagon of expectation and responsibility.  They could not figure out what happened.  Holed up in her room, she tried.  He did also, determined to figure everything out himself.  But the wind kept blowing everything out of whack.  They made cursory efforts to think about it together – he held her when she couldn’t sleep and she didn’t yell – but something always go in the way. 

The rains would not stop coming. 

The strangest thing happened on my way back to you.  The sidewalk rose into a corkscrew.  I had no option other than to follow its curve.  Weaving its way through the streets of Philadelphia, it uncovered murals the world has never seen.  Diego Rivera reminds the lovely couple smoking cigarettes outside the café of her face.  Winded, weathered, field-aged and universe-endorsed, my Mexican grandmother distributed peace lilies from the basket on her arm.  One by one we accept her gift and pass by.  Apples behind her reflect the sun.  We cease to forget where we come from.

I paused, to drink her in and noticed the freedom fighter walking my way.  Alone, hardly visible, I watched the scene unfold.  The man approached the smoking couple and pulled out his military identification card.  For credibility.  For entry into the street corner museum borne of Rivera’s gaze.  

“A war hero I am.  From Rochambeau, Algeria.  Just arrived on foot, over the bridge from Jersey.  Camden actually.”  He pushed back his right sleeve to reveal a deep V-shaped scar that outlined the space between the bones of his forearm.  To feel his pain, the girl moved her fingers along the bones.  Inside his wrist, she felt his heart beat. 

“I do not coming look for handouts.  I do not drink.  I do not smoke.  I do not rummage dumpsters for my next meal.”

She held up her hand to stop him and pointed across the street, beyond my grandmother’s face to the corner’s bodega.  

Before she could speak, he finished.  “I have suffered.  I am a war hero.” 

“I have nothing,” answered the girl, “but if they take food stamps over there, I will share with you a meal.”  Her date stared and taking another drag on his cigarette, he smiled.  She will share with me also, he thought.

The freedom fighter and this young girl navigated the oncoming traffic.  Like dancers, they crossed.  He asked her name.  “Grace,” answered she. 

They ate apples and corn tamales.  He made his way back over the bridge.  The girl rejoined her date at the pretty cafe table that Rivera created.   

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A Japanese freighter had been torpedoed during the Second World War, and it’s at the bottom of Tokyo’s harbor with a large hole in her hull. A team of engineers was called together to solve the problem of raising the wounded vessel to the surface. One of the engineers tackling this puzzle said he remembered seeing a Donald Duck cartoon when he was a boy where there was a boat at the bottom of an ocear with a hole in its hull, and they injected it with ping pong balls and it floated up. The skeptical group laughed but one of the experts was willing to give it a try. Of course, where in the world would you find twenty million ping-pong balls but in Tokyo? It turned out to the perfect solution. The balls were injected into the hull and it floated to the surface, the engineer was elated…. Moral solutions to problems are always found at an entirely different level. Also, believe in yourself in the face of impossible odds.
Tom Waits on an an odd thing that happened in an odd place