modernism to a cultural creative

"Thus, if you read Mr Joyce and Mr Eliot you will be struck by the indecency of the one, and the obscurity of the other." (Virginia Woolf, "Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown".)

tell me about it.

different pulses in the same vein

sick again. and this time it immobilised me for an entire day, made me hand up my HT late, got my group presentation postponed, and finally i still have to take my german test. and after 2 packets of IV drip in the clinic yesterday, the anti-nausea jab left me a huge bruise on my arm that remains. i really don't appreciate this falling sick...though i do appreciate very much how it is at an ok time, and when there is help around. but every time i fall ill i feel it a betrayal of my body, and i'm a bit angry inside. though i could still appreciate the rest of the days when my body is actually functioning as it should i guess? and that i learn to be even more thankful for health.

i've been drifting around in the virtual world a bit these past two weeks, and was very disturbed and almost upheaved, until last weekend and how things settled down more within me. and now i'm still reading, but more at a distance, and still thinking if there's anything i could do about it that might help. and immediately i hear a voice that tells me sometimes people don't want help, they don't like the usually morally high platform help offers itself from. but then i want to say in response that i only think of helping precisely because i relate so much to all that, that i've felt like that before, that i've been there and i know it's not all pretty, that i know what it's like to be lonely.

but i don't trust myself in writing. the things that are too close to me i can't properly write about. i don't like the slightly melodramatic way i tend to write about things, because i don't want any reflexive art to be in it at all when it is all so true. that's why i've never so far been able to write about sq. i don't think i've completely come to terms with it yet. slowly my soul is understanding that it is okay, that we'll try to do what we can on this side, but sometimes it still cries because it just doesnt go. v told me that night i was crying that p mentioned once that we react so badly to death because our soul is eternal, and because it is eternal it finds difficulty being reconciled to the thought of death, which is an end of sorts. that's why it takes time to remember how death is not always an end. and i'm so scared that it might be, for some of the people closest to me.

my body betrays me, but i would want to trust my soul more. that is where i abide, most of the time.

post-hiatus, post-high

i dunno what it is that made me wander back to this space...only to realise that it's already been more than two years. where does time fly to, seriously? time fascinates me. reading things from the past makes me completely baffled by the way there could have been a gap between "then" and "now", when only the now seems real, and yet the then could not have been too far from the now.
what then, and what now?
(haha.)
[laughing at my own joke is something i learnt from my sweet and endearing german lecturer whose patience really amazes m and i. how she patiently explains everything to c in class even when he asks the most inane questions.]
. . .
i'm quite fascinated by punctuation as well.
it's only recently that i'm sorta more assured that these little piques and interests are okay; they are not too weird, and somewhere, somebody actually feels the same way and thinks the same things. just nobody who tells me that's all. where do people go to find friends? don't they/you/we know? everybody's lonely inside. some just manage to flood the silence out, and postpone the realisation once again that it is true.

i cannot write poetry. but i'd love poetic prose. stringing the words together into lines and letting you hear the music i hear. it hurts, but beauty hurts too.

i believe in beauty, but i don't always believe in the beautiful.

from the other side

i think my HT will be disgraceful, but perhaps that is also how it will be most honest.
:

new books!

yes i must really get down to blogging here, because this will be my literary pensieve! my placeholder for thoughts on texts that i'm reading this sem, and everything else. my bookshelf looks nice now with all those penguin books, and i'm at moll flanders now and she really is one scandalous person! i've already lost track of how many husbands/lovers she's had..anyway. so i'll be back here for a more detailed thought-jotting of poor moll flanders.

meanwhile i must also mention bill bryson for his delightful books, one of which kept me entertained in my last hospital stay. which i must say was a much better companion than the fashion magazine my parents got for me the previous time i was in hospital. i practically read the fine prints, the cost of each article of dress there, every page like three or four times. ah.

and then in the midst of all these, to read the Good Book more, and in greater detail and with a more acute mind and a more open heart too. this year i want to keep up with pastor's daily devotional on the pauline epistles, and besides that, the homework we get at ypg com meetings (which currently is the book of romans), and then i want to read pastor's old devotionals on the Gospels too, to know and love Jesus better.

"You have commanded us to keep Your precepts diligently.
Oh, that my ways were directed to keep Your statutes!"
(Psalm 119:4-5)

the substantial and the real

is there truth beyond a corporeal body? that is the "real" that i refer to here -- that something can be substantial, in that it exists as a material body; yet it is not real, because it is not what it claims to be.

the character of "Susan Barton, Jr.", or so she claims, seems to give us an example of that. the older Susan Barton casts doubt on the identity of that young girl, and asks, "the girl who calls herself by my name -- is she substantial?" (152) here, she seems to mean "real", as defined above, meaning to ask if that girl were really her daughter, the daughter she claims to have lost years ago. but in Foe's reply, we see the other meaning of the word "substantial":
"you touch her, you embrace her; you kiss her. would you dare to say she is not substantial?" (152)
aferwhich susan barton also submits to the idea that corporeality equates to sustantiality equates to reality. but the nagging question for the reader is still, 'is that her real daughter?' and her being substantial as a physical body within the text does not lend any deeper reading to uncovering the truth of her identity.

in the same way then, seeing words as a body of text, does the existence of a body of text make something real, or existent? when i was a kid i used to think that for everything that has a word to represent it, it must exist. so imagine the kind of life i led, thinking that ghosts and vampires and dragons and witches and pixies existed...thankfully i knew words like "angel" as well. but now that i (ought to) have put away these childish things, the question is raised again. is susan's narrative, simply because it is written out into a body of text, completely true and reliable?

coetzee seems to suggest otherwise. he raises an alternative -- that the truth of the story, what really happened, can exist formless, without words. the experience untold and unrepresented by language is not any less that the experience duly recorded and worded. this is expressed in the silence of friday, and the plausibility of a much richer experience than susan can guess. is it any lesser? coetzee's writing of the last part of Foe seems to suggest otherwise. going to friday, he hears a myriad sounds of the island, which seems to be all that susan has failed to uncover, unleashed on the narrator (154). the last bit of the novel is especially poignant -- that the master narrator, presumably coetzee, should want to listen to friday, of all people, and though not hearing words, hearing sounds that lead the narrator to realise that there is, within, a story. this story, though wordless, is true. just as some stories, though worded, are fictional.

allow me to offer an anecdote as an example. one year, about a week or two before my birthday, two good friends came to me and began telling me about this girl they met outside school at some community service thing. her name was anne, and my two friends insisted that she was a really sweet and nice girl. they then excitedly told me more about her, and that they should arrange for us to meet one day, as they thought anne and i would make really good friends. i must say i was not a little excited, because the way they made her out to be, she was as sweet and gentle as anyone could expect. so i kept wondering who this anne was, what she looked like, which school she was in, what her voice would be like, etc.

then on my birthday, i found on my desk a beautiful doll with a little blue cap and blue pyjamas, and next to her was a note, written in child-like writing and with a red crayon, "dear peiyong, my name is anne. i am your new friend. i think we will have good times together, and i hope you like me too. -XX anne"

it actually took me quite a while to make the connection and realise that there was no new human friend called anne who was so sweet and gentle...yet, anne is a substantial figure, is she not? as a doll she has a material body. furthermore, she had a text to represent her! the little note was written not only in the style of a little child as anne my doll was (and is, i sure hope), it looked just like something a little girl would write. and to top it all off, my anne has a voice too. when you wind her up, she hums to the tune of "it's a small world after all, it's a small world after all, it's a small world after all, it's a small, small world." (oh i just realised the irony of it!) so by all counts anne is substantial, physical, bodied. yet, she does not exist the way i'd expected her to...she's not human, she doesn't do community service, she can't make conversation etc etc..she's not real in our world of reality.

so, it's a small world after all, yet even if there's no more space for more bodies, there'd still be space for ideas, for stories that do not take words and physical beings to put across!

real and imagined pain and our complicity

The one thing i remember about pain in my own experiences is that pain cannot be 'reenacted'. One can recall the experience of pain, but never really feel that pain again..perhaps one can even remember the turmoil in the heart and mind when experiencing pain, but beyond these symptoms of pain, the actual experience of pain does not repeat itself in its exact form. (interestingly, pain, a physical condition, has symptoms that are psychological -- fear, tension etc. whereas most of the time, it is some deeper, internal cause that brings about physical and obvious symptoms.) In the same way, witnesses of pain, much as they are within the same time and space as he who suffers, never really experience even a fraction of that sensation of pain.

Hence the objectification of pain, as Scarry puts it -- the making it easier for third parties to glimpse at the possibility of pain. In fact, it is the objectification of pain that supplies the object for imagination; without pain being objectified, there is nothing to feed the imagination, and the experience of pain will then not be able to be passed on to a third party, the spectator. Probably that's why it's only in torture that pain is deliberately objectified; often the one being tortured is raised as an example, a deterrent to all other third parties so that they would not disobey a particular regime, and hence the need for these third parties to imagine pain, hence the need for objectification. As in our first article, "Though indisputably real to the sufferer, it is, unless accompanied by visible body damage or a disease label, unreal to others." (56)

Initially i thought that the position of power will then be rather simple -- the torturer has power over the tortured, yet the tortured in a way has some kind of power over the spectators? In that he has an experience that the spectators do not have control over, and is viewing without a tangible, closer relation to. The inaccesibility of pain to the spectators, despite their observation of it, seemed to me to render them 'helpless' in a way -- unable to stop it from happening, yet unable to participate and avoid guilt. But as Scarry continues, it is really the fact that the one in pain is so broken in connection to everything and everyone else that almost makes him cease to exist in reality :
"the lack of acknowledgement and recognition (which if present could act as a form of self-extension) becomes a second form of negation and rejection, the social equivalent of the physical aversiveness. This terrifying dichotomy and doubling is itself redoubled, multiplied, and magnified in torture because instead of the person's pain being subjectively real but unobjectified and invisible to all others, it is now hugely objectified, everywhere visible, as incontestably present in the external as in the internal world, and yet it is simultaneously categorically denied." (56)

The denial or inability to truly relate to the pain of another makes that pain heightened for the person who is already hurting, and yet it increases the power of the one inflicting pain, and the one watching. So the third party is really complicit in the infliction of pain too? The knowledge of the inflicted pain of another, yet doing nothing about it, makes one guilty also of inflicting that pain. And it seems like the only way to extend sympathy for the one in pain is really to participate in that pain as well. Often it would not be possible, nor make any sense to volunteer oneself for pain, but perhaps in being so struck in the conscience and consciousness of pain, one experiences the turmoil of the soul and heart, and that is also an experience of pain on a different plane?

Remembering then Grosz's point about society's inscriptions on the human body...torture and pain are very obvious and literal inscriptions on the body that are obviously 'bad'. A third party would know immediately that physical torture ought not be condoned. Yet in many other ways all of us are willing third parties, and hence complicit in insribing on the bodies of our fellow people -- society's treatment of those who are other from us. We cringe when we talk about torture, but in racial and gender prejudice, or even economic prejudice, we write on the bodies of fellow people by marking them out as different, and as less. So some of us are in fact not third parties, but torturers. People who assign themselves power by their "blindness [and] willed amorality" (Scarry, 37). Not hard to imagine, because there are so many objectified instances around us already.

the body, the soul, and their limitations

Reading the Metamorphosis really gave me the creeps cos for some reason, perhaps due to the "ideology" i was raised with, the innate mental framework (kudos to CDA), i kept having the picture of a cockroach as the monstrous vermin. And i really don't like cockcroaches. Especially huge ones the size of a human being! Which leaves splotches of stuff wherever he crawls..plus he flies. And can hang on the ceiling -- something human beings can't do, which really gives the vermin power over even the human beings. No wonder they were scared of him..

In Gregor's case, the 'other' is feared for a while, then trampled on. Which is a rather realistic depiction of all the other 'other's in society i think..what is unknown is feared for a while, but once it is ascertained that it cannot bring harm, it is simply rejected, excommunicated. For Gregor though, he is 'other' in body, and even though he is not othered in the mind (ie he still possesses thought and reasoning abilities as humans know it), he is treated as an 'other', and is misunderstood even by his own family, hence indirectly killed by their neglect of him.

That, we can understand. but for the reader who does realise that he is not 'other' in the mind, that there is are still traces of Gregor we can relate to, it seems we still respond with aversion to his grotesque transformation into a bug. But the really disturbing thing is how, within that unimaginable, gargantuan gross body, is a human soul that still loves, and still craves to be loved. The incongruity makes one cringe, and we realise that not only is the physical transformed body of gregor unimaginable, the combination of a monstrous body with a human soul is even more unimaginable..in some ways we may even reject trying to imagine it. So the othered body is not other just because it is different, it is othered by the minds that are unable to imagine nor fathom the possibility of that existence.

Another thing i was reminded of...in our first class we were talking about whether the body includes the soul, or whether the physical body should be distinctly differentiated from the soul. From the Metamorphosis, the dislocation between the body and the soul (or consciousness) seems to suggest that the two indeed can be distinct. Personally i'd agree with that. The human consciousness or soul, that inner being that just knows can stand aside far enough to look upon and criticise the physical body. So the human being is really divided in himself!

A random thought...why an insect rather than some other animal? Maybe cos kafka, being the long and scrawny person he was, could relate more to an insect? heh..ok a tad puerile here..but really, to have Gregor enjoy the lightness of being something other than human makes it quite necessary for him to have become an insect? i mean, if he'd turned into a cow or something, he won't be able to mount the ceiling. Also, the thing about kafka is how he can write about something so..impossible? in such a matter-of-fact way that one knows it wasn't mean to be funny, and in fact is disturbed, or at least impacted, by it.

*Aside: it's really hard to talk about kafka, because he's so big and yet so elusive at the same time? like there's so much to say but it's so hard to pinpoint it without putting kafka into unnecessary, undignified small boxes...