...the secrets gathered in the shadows at the tree line that rustled and waited until he passed, and which made the hair on his arms and the back of his neck stand on end and his scalp tighten when he felt them flooding, invisible, the road around him, were dispelled each time he turned his direct attention to them, scattered to just beyond his sight. The true essence, the secret recipe of the forest and the light and the dark was far too fine and subtle to be observed with my blunt eye--water sac and nerves, miracle itself, fine itself: light catcher. But the thing itself is not forest and light and dark, but something else scattered by my coarse gaze, by my dumb intention. The quilt of leaves and light and shadow and ruffling breezes might part and I'd be given a glimpse of what is on the other side; a stitch might work itself loose or be worked loose. The weaver might have made one bad loop of whatever the thread might be wound from--light, gravity, dark from stars--had somehow been worked loose by the wind in its constant worrying of white buds and green leaves and blood-orange leaves and bare branches and two of the pieces of whatever it is that this world is knit from had come loose from each other and there was maybe just a finger width's hole, which I was lucky enough to spot in the glittering leaves from this wagon of drawers and nimble enough to scale the silver trunk and brave enough to poke my finger into the tear, that might offer to the simple touch a measure of tranquility or reassurance.
I just finished this book, tinkers by Paul Harding. It's beautifully written, like a poem. The plot is slow/sometimes seemingly pointless, but the imagery and language are beautiful. In a nutshell, the book is a collection of the thoughts of a dying man. The best way I can describe it is if postmodern Faulkner and Wordsworth had teamed up to rewrite Nabokov's Speak, Memory (it's even got a lovely allusion to Nabokov's stained glass imagery).
The book feels very wintery -- I imagined all of the scenes from the past happening in the cold all the time. But then I went back and realized that most of it is set in springtime, so I guess I'm just a sucker for cover art (an undeniably wintery scene of white sky and white landscape with bare, fading trees and one small person), or the recent snowstorm is getting to me. Anyways, it was a pleasant read that made me wish for a fire in the fireplace.
The view from our awesome seats - an early Christmas present from my family!
Last night I saw In the Heights, which I’ve been wanting to see for ages and which was everything I expected it to be and more. The whole show made me laugh and cry at the exact same time, as it recreated people and places and experiences that are simultaneously familiar and completely foreign. I know I can’t really articulate everything that it made me feel and think (in part because it’s one of those things that are just moving in ways that you can’t explain), but some initial reactions:
I think the show is really remarkable for how much it makes you conscious of the audience and your role as an audience in relation to the performance on stage, because you can’t help but notice that the people in the audience are not members of the society reproduced on the stage, and that the people represented on stage are not members of the audience. (The guy behind me actually told his companion during intermission that he’d love to steal the fire hydrant stage prop so that he could use it to save his city parking spot.) The show signals right away that it’s aware of this class and race divide, as Usnavi looks out at us and says, “I bet you’ve never been up past 96th street… Take notes, I’m going to test you later.”
And yet as the audience laughs, you know it’s because they’re recognizing things they see in life, characters they’ve encountered but probably don’t really know. I know I can’t speak for everyone in the audience – for sure, some of those people probably DO know people represented on stage and DO get jokes that I probably missed (and of course some of the laughter is because it is just funny). But sometimes it felt like the audience was recognizing things they hadn’t understood but which were now being explained to them in a way they could understand, or sympathize with. And at the same time the show was criticizing us for noticing these things without really trying to understand them—or worse, jumping to our own conclusions that assume the worst about other people.
It’s amazing to me that despite the fact that this Other culture is on display (literally) for us, it’s still very much not available to us. That this is no freak-show “look at these different people and how they live” but a recognition that we audience members do not understand and therefore do not appreciate this other society. I think we’re supposed to feel jealous that we’ve never had those experiences (and at the same time aware of how lucky we were not to). When everyone on that stage interacts in such a familiar way with each other (everyone knows everyone and accepts them and talks to them and jokes with them and dances with them, etc etc etc) and we are completely shut out from that, the show is proudly demonstrating that we are incontrovertibly on the outside. Enter ambivalence about trying to help other people, since it seems to me that the display of other cultures is most problematic when it comes with an assumption that we’re supposed to find what is “wrong” so that we, the outsiders can fix it.
That this world could be available to us (Columbia is so close to these neighborhoods) but isn’t is essentially the same message the elite institutions (of which I’ve been lucky to be a part) send to them. I have more to say about this, but that’s a whole ‘nother post that I’m not ready to write yet. In the meantime, see this article (courtesy of Melissa), written by a Barnard grad with almost the exact same background/experiences as me.
I also loved the show as an exposition on movement and displacement. The whole show bustles, with many dancers on stage doing different things – there’s so much movement on stage all the time, but it still stays within the space of the stage. No one ever goes anywhere (even “off-stage” is more likely to be shown as “somewhere inside one of the houses”). This movement evokes the bustle of the city and dance-like acrobatics necessary to negotiate your way down a busy sidewalk, but it also transforms the movement from a utilitarian act of getting from one place to another into an art form that deserves to be celebrated in its own right. The tension between moving and not moving is echoed in the overall structure of the show: there’s so much coming and going in and out of the neighborhood, as everyone’s families are coming from another country, but hoping to go to another place. But despite this movement, mobility still seems impossible.
On a somewhat related note: during the songs, when all of the different lines happen at the same time, the individual melodies and lyrics are obscured because everyone is singing. Everyone has individual hopes and dreams –- a story to tell, in short –- but when they’re all overlapping and conflicting with each other it turns into both a representation of the noise of the city and the sort of muddled chaos of life. There were moments when I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to feel like the whole was smothering the part or that the parts were coming together to form a glorious cacophony – because the show and the real life experiences it’s depicting make that line a little bit ambiguous.
But to get back to the idea of movement: at the end of the show, I felt like they had demonstrated that a person is a body and a story. When you look at a place (especially a place so full of movement) from a distance, over time, everyone comes and goes, and the faster they do it, the more replaceable they are. Each person becomes a placeholder for the one before and the one coming after, a mere body (only it’s even more chaotic than that because it’s not like there are specific roles that get passed along from person to person). But there was this staggering sense of the uniformity of people who come in, open up a small business, and then leave for the next person to do the same. BUT, the show turns it around and presents the fighting cry of the individual who fills that mere body – it says that the infinite-time version of life doesn’t mean anything because within a pocket of time there are individuals with stories, and those stories are important, define who we are. (For more on people as stories, I recently read (and loved) “Individualism and the Mystery of the Social Self,” by Wayne Booth in Freedom and Interpretation (Barbara Johnson ed. New York: Basic Books, 1993))
Human beings naturally move a lot – this is why I’m interested in refugees and displacement in general. If people naturally move around so much, if mobility is part of the human experience, why is it sometimes celebrated and sometimes a problem? Why do people choose to leave? Why do people choose to stay? If our identities are shaped in large part by those around us and the places we call home, what happens when those people and places are always changing?
And now I really, really have to stop watching youtube videos of Lin-Manuel Miranda (creator of In the Heights) and start writing my last two big papers of the semester. In case you haven't seen the show yet, it closes on January 9, and this is why you should see it:
“Mr. President, there is a war going on in this country and I’m not referring to the war in Iraq or the war in Afghanistan. I’m talking about a war being waged by some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in this country, against the working families of the United States of America, against the disappearing and shrinking middle class of our country. The reality is that many of the nation’s billionaires are on the war path. They want more, more, more. Their greed has no end. And apparently there is very little concern for our country or for the people of this country if it gets in the way of the accumulation of more and more wealth and more and more power …”
Today he spoke for 8 hours about what's wrong with the tax cut deal. That is what integrity and determination are all about.
It’s the middle of the busiest part of the semester, which naturally means it must be time to do program planning for next semester. I’m trying not to repeat my mistakes of last semester, when I signed up for a bunch of random classes, figuring I’d sort it out later, and then discovered all these great classes that I was supposed to apply for. I’m also procrastinating.
I can’t really express how excited I am for my last semester—not because it’s my last, but because I have basically fulfilled all my requirements, and can take whatever I want. Yay! Last night I was taking a look at the course offerings, and realized I needed to think about what I want out of my last semester, since otherwise I’ll never make any decisions.
So I set some goals:
I want to learn about different cultures. I want to take at least one class focused on an area of the world other than Europe or Sub-Saharan Africa, preferably a class that delves into its literature, art, religion or other aspects of its culture. On a related note, no classes on topics I already feel relatively well-versed in.
No big lecture classes. If there are more than 30 people, I’m not interested.
In terms of requirements, I still need one more class for my French minor, and I’d like to keep up Swahili for another semester. I might need to take a senior seminar in Human Rights, but let’s hope not.
Less politics, more literature.
If possible, it would be great to not have all my classes on the same day
As usual, I’m going to shop as many classes as possible during the first two weeks. Arguably the best part of college is going to those first lectures, when the professor presents a nice concise summary of the ideas s/he hopes students will learn, but you don’t have to commit to all those readings yet. And, of course, a class is only as good as its professor…
So here’s my current list (in roughly alphabetical order by dept). Thoughts, opinions, recommendations most welcome, and if anyone wants to come shop these with me, that would be great!
CONTEMP ISLAMIC CIVILIZATION
Unfortunately, this class fails the big lecture class rule.
A survey of the contemporary intellectual currents in modern Islamic societies, with a special emphasis on the societies of the Middle East, and on the cultural issues not covered in classical Islamic Civilization courses. The course complements the Introduction to Islamic Civilization currently given jointly by MEALAC and the Committee on Asia and the Middle East by focusing on the texts of the contemporary world.
HINDU GODDESSES
This class looks so incredible!! And the professor has great reviews on CULPA. I’m so upset that I haven’t taken any classes in Indian culture or religion.
Prerequisites: One course in Indian culture or religion or permission of the instructor. Study of a variety of Hundu goddesses, focusing on representative figures from all parts of India and on their iconography, associated powers, and regional rituals. Materials are drawn from textual, historical, and field studies, and discussion includes several of the methodological controversies involving interpretation of goddess worship in India.
COLLOQUIUM ON MAJOR TEXTS: MIDDLE EAST/INDIA
Readings in translation and discussion of texts of Middle Eastern and Indian origin. Readings include the Qur'an, Islamic philosophy, Sufi poetry, the Upanishads, Buddhist sutras, the Bhagavad Gita, Indian epics and drama, and Gandhi's Autobiography.
COLLOQUIUM IN LITERARY THEORY
Examination of concepts and assumptions present in contemporary views of literature. Theory of meaning and interpretation (hermeneutics); questions of genre (with discussion of representative examples); a critical analysis of formalist, psychoanalytic, structuralist, post-structuralist, Marxist, and feminist approaches to literature.
MAGIC AND MODERNITY
Examines literary treatments of magic produced at five pivotal moments in (mostly) European intellectual history, and inquires: How does the depiction of magic relate to the idea of “modernity” and its attendant anxieties? How do texts produce magical effects? How does magic function as a way of understanding the world? Readings include works by Ovid, Apuleius, Marie de France, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Goethe, Pushkin, Bulgakov and others, as well as folklore and theoretical texts.
THE MOD NOVEL: BALZAC,FLAUBERT
Can’t find the blurb on this one, but if I’m going to take a French class, I’d love to spend it reading Balzac and Flaubert. No clue if this will actually fulfill the minor requirements, but I’m going to ask the dept if I can just read the texts and write my papers in French.
Comparative Literature Seminar: DARK CHRONICLES—RECENT NOBEL PRIZE WINNERS
OMG I want to take this so badly! I hope I get in…
Admittance by permission of Instructor. In this course, we will read and discuss the fiction, non-fiction, and acceptance speeches of the most recent recipients of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The writers to be examined, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio (2008), Orhan Pamuk (2006), Harold Pinter (2005), Elfriede Jelinek (2004), V. S. Naipaul (2001), Gao Xingjian (2000), and Gunter Grass (1999) record cultural shifts and social forces central to their societies as well as our civilization, addressing the world wars, immigration, postcolonialism, class inequities, gender oppression, and often, the fragility of identity. Although coming from vastly different backgrounds and countries, the recent Nobel laureates share a difficult and challenging view of human nature. We will analyze whether and how their art, potentially disturbing, challenges the traditional cultural understanding of narrative representation, evident in their experimentation with language and modes of representation. We will also explore the relationship between the authors’ personal point of view and national concerns with global and universal themes and issues that they address. Finally, we will explore the tradition of prize-giving as a vehicle of literary canonization and the global recognition that Nobel brings to its winners. The assignments will include: a final essay, comprehensive take-home midterm exam, participation, and one short presentation for the writer of your choice from the list.
GENRE,GENDER,MOD JAPANESE LIT
This course engages in close readings of major works of Japanese literature from the 18th-century to the present with particular attention to the issues of gender and genre in the formation of modern Japanese literature. The course considers figures such as female ghosts, wives and courtesans, youth and schoolgirls, the new woman and the modern girl, actors/actresses and cross-dressers. Readings highlight the role of literary genres, examining the ways in which the literary texts engage with changing socio-historical conditions, especially with regard to gender and social relations. Genres include puppet plays, ghost stories, melodrama, Bildungsroman, domestic fiction, autobiographical fiction, and the fantastic. Related critical issues are the novel and the formation of a national community; women’s writings; media and the development of urban mass culture; colonial and imperial spaces; history and memory. All readings are in English.
MATH IN THE CITY
I’m getting more and more into education
In partnership with NYC public school teachers, students will have opportunities to engage in mathematical learning, lesson study, curriculum development, and implementation, with a focus on using the City as a resource. Students will explore implications for working with diverse populations.
DISABILITY & LITERATURE
Doesn’t pass the Other Cultures test, but it does relate to questioning my own privilege, which is similar. Not sure how big of a class this will be…
Writings about disability and eccentric bodies, from Oedipus of the swollen foot to The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Texts will cover a range of periods, including medieval narratives of miraculous cure, the hunchback king in Shakespeare's Richard III, and a powerfully immobile and sexually magnetic woman in Trollope's Barchester Towers. While the course will focus on motor disability and bodily variety, students will be encouraged (and required) to seek out texts that address other issues such as blindness, deafness, or mental disability. Critical readings will be drawn from the emerging field of Disability Studies. Issues to be addressed will include the great historical shift from notions of the "ideal" or heroic, to the "normal" body; the social construction of disability; the cripple as icon or agent; disabled identity and the return of the memoire.
PUBLIC SPEAKING
I’m embarrassingly bad at public speaking, so this would be a really useful class for me, even if I don’t really want to take it.
Effective oral presentation in speeches, discussions, and interviews. We will explore the reciprocal relationship between active listening and extemporaneous speaking, structured writing and spontaneous remarks, rhetorical strategy and audience analysis, historical models and contemporary practice.
SEMINAR ON SPECIAL THEMES: BLACK INTERNATIONALISMS
This course locates itself in renewed, energetic debates around contemporary and deeper histories of transnationalism and Diaspora studies, particular the work of Brent Hayes Edwards in The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism(a required text). African American and Africana studies have never been confined to national borders, but how has this Diasporic sense been reflected in the popular imaginary and other exchanges? We also engage the interdisciplinarity of knowledge production in these studies, and we ask what the current status is of black internationalisms are, and how and where they are most readily expressed in the arts.
ENGLISH LITERATURE 1600-1660
(Lecture). Poetry and prose from the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, through the civil wars and Cromwellian commonwealth, to the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. We will consider the linked revolutions in English politics, religion, science, philosophy, and social and erotic relations, and will ask how these cultural transformations influenced literary form. Authors will include James I, John Donne, Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon, Lancelot Andrewes, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, John Milton, Elizabeth Cary, Thomas Browne, Henry Vaughan, Robert Herrick, Andrew Marvell, Margaret Cavendish and Thomas Hobbes, as well as various Levellers, Ranters, Quakers, and perhaps a Muggletonian or two.
ADVANCED TRANSLATION WORKSHOP
Another of the few classes that might(?) fulfill my minor requirement
A practical introduction to translation from French to English (and vice versa), to translation theory and to comparative stylistics. The course will emphasize stylictic issues through close reading and frequent individual and group work on both prose and poetry.
THE AUTHOR AS LAWBREAKER
This class would definitely fulfill my minor requirement
A study of writers presenting themselves as "bad boys" or outcasts from the Middle-Ages to the Twentieth Century. Authors include Rutebeuf, Villon, Tristan l'Hermite, Rimbaud, Vall�s, Genet, Sagan.
WEST AFRICAN HISTORY
I’m trying to branch out from Africa classes, but in fairness, I don’t know that much about West Africa.
This course offers a survey of main themes in West African history over the last millenium, with particular emphasis on the period from the mid-fifteenth through the twentieth century. Themes include the age of West African empires (Ghana, Mali, Songhay), re-alignments of economic and political energies towards the Atlantic coast, the rise and decline of the trans-Atlantic trade in slaves, the advent and demise of colonial rule, and internal displacement, migrations, and revolutions. In the latter part of the course, we will appraise the continuities and ruptures of the colonial and post-colonial eras.
Russia and the Soviet Union in the 20th Century
Speaking of history I don’t know much about…
The course offers an introduction into the history of Russia and the Soviet Union in the twentieth century. It combines lectures and discussion sections as well as survey texts and a selection of sources, including documents generated by state/party bodies, various documents produced by individual authors (especially diaries, letters, and memoirs), and some film materials. Putting the Soviet phenomenon into its wider intellectual, cultural, and geographical contexts, we will also address questions of modernity and modernization, socialism and communism, and authoritarian practices in politics, culture, and society.
IMMIGRANT NEW YORK
So excited about this!!
For the past century and a half, New York City has been the first home of millions of immigrants to the United States. This course will compare immigrants' encounter with New York at the dawn of the twentieth century with contemporary issues, organizations, and debates shaping immigrant life in New York City. As a service learning course, each student will be required to work 2-4 hours/week in the Riverside Language Center or programs for immigrants run by Community Impact.
ETHNIC CONFLICT & UNREST
Post-1965 immigration in the U.S. has prompted conflicts between new immigrant groups and established racial and ethnic groups. This seminar explores ethnic conflict and unrest that takes place in the streets, workplace, and everyday social life. Focus is on sociological theories that explain the tensions associated with the arrival of new immigrants.
INTRODUCTION TO STATISTICS
Ugh, I know I should take statistics, but I just don’t want to. At all. Not even a little bit. Don’t get me wrong, I love calculus and other math/science classes that are cool in their own right, but stats is (from my uninformed perspective) just a tool that people use to do other stuff. Booooring.
LITERATURE AND REVOLUTION: TRADITION, INNOVATION, AND POLITICS (20TH CENTURY)
Knowledge of Russian not required. Survey of Russian literature from symbolism to the culture of high Stalinism and post-Socialist realism of the 1960s and 1970s, including major works by Bely, Blok, Olesha, Babel, Bulgakov, Platonov, Zoshchenko, Kharms, Kataev, Pasternak, and Erofeev. Literature viewed in a multi-media context featuring music, avant-garde and post-avant-garde visual art, and film.
DISASTERS AND DEVELOPMENT
This class sounds awesome, but I’m a little worried that it would be a lot like “Challenges of Sustainable Development”, only more about environmental science and less about development…
his course offers undergraduate students, for the first time, a comprehensive course on the link between natural disaster events and human development at all levels of welfare. It explores the role that natural disasters might have and have had in modulating development prospects. Any student seriously interested in sustainable development, especially in light of climate change, must study the nature of extreme events - their causes, global distribution and likelihood of future change. This course will cover not only the nature of extreme events, including earthquakes, hurricanes, floods and droughts but also their transformation into disaster through social processes. it will ultimately help students to understand the link between such extreme events, the economic/social shock they represent and development outcomes. The course will combine careful analysis of the natural and social systems dynamics that give rise to disasters and examine through group learning case studies from the many disasters that have occurred in the first decade of the 21st century.
CLIMATE CHANGE, RIGHTS & DEVPT
COMPARATIVE DEVELOPMENT
ELEMENTARY SWAHILI II
Definitely taking this
CITIES IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES
Prerequisites: Must attend first class for instructor permission. Preference to Urban Studies majors. Examination of cities in developing countries, with a focus on environment, employment, and housing. Four cases will be studied: Sao Paulo, Brazil; Johannesburg, South Africa; Bombay, India; and Shanghai, China. We will consider urbanization patterns and the attendant issues, the impact of global economic trends, and governmental and non-governmental responses.
UNHEARD VOICES: AFRICAN WOMEN
I really want to take this!
How does one talk of women in Africa without thinking of Africa as a 'mythic unity'? We will consider the political, racial, social and other contexts in which African women write and are written about in the context of their located lives in Africa and in the African Diaspora. Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 14 students.
This is a fantastic article from the New Yorker about the erasure of people of color, that I highly recommend reading.
On a personal note, even as my heart goes out to those who may feel erased by the unfortunate advertisement, I can't help but feel a slight twinge of self-indulgent pride: a year ago, I would not have understood this article the way I do today. Thanks to the internet--or more specifically, my friends who are awesome and far more aware than I am and who have patiently directed me to a better understanding of my privilege--I read this article so differently than I would have before reading, say, this, and this and other similarly insightful posts, or before I started lurking a bit too frequently on Shakesville, Digby and Melissa's awesome tumblr [edit: now disabled].
Admittedly, I'm a bit late getting to this whole internet-self-education thing and I still have a long, long way to go, but better late than never, right?
"To be mean and generous, depraved and decent, loving and murderous, not by turns but all at once—that, it seems, is the true burden of our existence."
I'm currently taking a class on French literature up to 1800 for my minor requirement, and so far I've pretty much hated everything we've read. I've already taken it's sister class, which covers French literature after 1800, and it was honestly one of my favorite classes at Barnard, so it was maybe inevitable that I'd enjoy this one less. (To be clear, the class itself is perfectly enjoyable and I have no complaints at all about the prof, just the reading.)
Here's my problem with the Enlightenment literature (e.g. Voltaire, Madame de Graffigny, Rousseau, Diderot): it's too utilitarian. These authors have a message to send, a critique of the society in which they're living, and all of the other aspects of literature (plot, characters, etc) are just window-dressing. We never get to hear about the setting (except the structural injustices of French society) and the characters are simple representations of everything the author thinks are good, innocent, and just in the world.
Last night I had to read a chunk of Diderot's La Religieuse, which is so far my least favorite of the texts we've read--I'm barely able to keep the look of utter skepticism off of my face as the prof gushes that this is one of the best pieces of writing of the whole period. Clearly I'm missing something. Not only is the narrator incredibly annoying (IMO), there are also all sorts of inconsistencies in her narrative. We can't figure out when in the storyline she is writing, as she claims to be ignorant of facts that she clearly knows at other points in the narrative (undermining the claim that this was all written at the same time). At one point, the main character launches into a passionate critique of the French justice system--but she simply wouldn't have had the knowledge to do so. This diatribe is clearly coming directly from Diderot. In revisions, he "solves" this problem by randomly inserting a quotation mark in the middle of the paragraph and attributing the rest of the speech to a character who has spoken a grand total of, maybe, 3 sentences 20 pages ago. This sort of sloppiness reveals Diderot's indifference to the structure, plot and characters of his work: that's all just a decoration for his social critique, and the character only exists as a means of spreading his message.
Arguably, Zola's Nana does the same thing--Nana is a representation of Paris and its degradation, a character who must die to achieve a higher symbolic status--but Zola can still take your breath away with his descriptions of Paris, and Nana is still a relatively rounded-out character. In a sense, all literature is the author's attempt to send a message out into the world by way of a narrative. The difference is that in most literature, the characters at least get to be a cardboard cutout that can trot around a textually-developed world. In these texts, the characters are merely speech-bubbles.
I think this reveals a failure of Enlightenment thought. Why couldn't Diderot simply write, "I think it's wrong to put young women in convents and force them to become nuns just because their families can't afford their dowries. Here's why this policy is wrong...."? The fact that he felt he needed to construct a person with a story to be his mouthpiece in order for people to listen, to understand, and to care is evidence that humans need narrative and empathetic connections. The Enlightenment championed rationality and the ideal of the natural man from which we all began, but rational appeals to help those who are suffering based solely on our common humanity aren't enough. Empathy might not be enough to ensure the human rights of everyone either, but rationality alone certainly won't motivate people to help those who suffer.
Living with other people is always an adventure. Understand that I do really like the girls I'm living with this year, but, as always, there are just some lifestyle differences that you work around and/or laugh off. This semester, we've had a bit of a bug infestation in our kitchen, which persists despite ant and roach traps AND a thorough extermination by Facilities. And then this:
Me: There is a pot of food on the kitchen windowsill (like, outside). Are we TRYING to attract every sort of animal in the city??
Britt: Yes. We picked into an infestation-themed suite. LIGHT IT ON FIRE WHO IS SO INCOMPREHENSIBLY RETARDED!
Even though scientists tell us that no object is truly immovable, it seems to me that there are walls in this world that cannot be breached: walls of misinformation, sloppy thinking, and stupidity. It’s hard to be concrete and specific here, since I mean to encompass nearly everything I think is wrong with the world in these so-called walls—I am being intentionally general in this post.
But to give the examples currently on my mind: I don’t have much patience for arguments in which either “side” simply repeats the same (wrong) points over and over again, like the current debate over the proposed mosque in Lower Manhattan (I will not enter into nitpicking over whether or not we can call it the “Ground Zero mosque”). I think that the question of whether or not Obama is a Muslim can be answered simply and easily, and that should be the end of that. Racism and anti-immigrant legislation and refugee camps: our bizarre relation to the Other has fascinated me for years. These are more difficult issues, but at the same time, the basic fact of the equal humanity of all people just should not even be disputed… And yet there’s a frustrating (from my perspective) refusal to change, a refusal to think critically, a refusal to see anything other than what one wants to see.
In my opinion, these are the walls we need to break down to make any sort of difference—in anything. This narrowmindedness is the world’s immovable object, and those who would like to see change need to become an unstoppable force to have even a chance. I’m currently skeptical that we are such a force.
**Spoiler alert: I kind of give away the end of Gallipoli, but you pretty much know what’s going to happen anyways...
Tonight I watched the movie Gallipoli, which was one of the most beautiful movies I’ve seen in a while. Nevertheless, the mind-boggling stupidity of the British military strategy and its needless cruelty is painful to watch. The kid, an Australian soldier who sprints at record speeds and whose beaming smile lights up the screen throughout the movie, could not be a clearer representation of an unstoppable force. He represents the joy and innocence of life—wonderful, bursting-at-the-seams life--and his life crashes against the determined immovability of the British commander.
It’s easy to come away with the impression that the immovable object shatters and dissipates the unstoppable force. Life is not so unstoppable, and that is the tragedy of putting these impenetrable walls in front of it. Indeed, this was my frustrated train of thought after watching the movie: if we, those who want to right wrongs, aren’t even an unstoppable force, how on earth can we even budge the immovable stupidity?
But I’ll try to convince myself of a more positive message, even if I don’t quite believe in it wholeheartedly. What stays with the viewer at the end of the movie is the kid and the unwavering, euphoric energy of life. I love that the movie ends with a jolt: not only do we skip over-sentimental grieving scenes, the world and the characters of the movie stay with us. We can’t simply rush back into our own world, where everything (or almost everything) is comfortable and easy and safe, because we are still in that other world, waiting for the conclusion we would typically expect from a Hollywood movie. When the movie ended I needed to be alone, to get away from my family and shut myself up in my head, because I was still in that world and not ready to be pulled back into this one so quickly.
Maybe what happens when an irresistible force meets an unstoppable object is that it ricochets, and spreads: we viewers absorb some of that kid’s force for our personal battles against stubborn misinformation and logical fallacies. In the grander scheme of things, I hope that life isn’t just a cyclical encounter of two impossible terms of a logic problem, but that life, and change, move inexorably onwards.
I feel a little silly, or arrogant, writing just to share my thoughts with the internets. But I really enjoyed blogging while I was travelling and I don't want to go back to my old livejournal (though I will always have a special place for lj in my heart), and besides, someday Britt won't be constantly available to listen to my rants about my own indecisiveness, or grade inflation, or other people's selfishness and grammar mistakes. So I've been thinking for a while that I need a place to put stuff that doesn't go in other places, and that's here.
