During this partial hiatus from my so-called blog, I have been thinking a great deal about ways to overhaul it upon my proper return. One idea I've had would be to eliminate the early posts from 2004-05. They have not stood the test of time, with respect to style or content. If I may be permitted to make such a comparison, they look less like classic Disney, the charming black-and-white depictions of Mickey Mouse as Steamboat Willie, before he became the icon of a multinational corporation, and more like early Garfield.
But I'm drifting. The real problem I have with all that juvenilia, composed at the ripe young age of 33, is the feigned stance of an engaged leftist I felt compelled to take at the time. As if the internet only had room for political posturing! In more recent years it's become hard for me not to think that the vastly greater portion of political commitments people express, and most of all that bloggers express, are but tools for social distinction, for defining which group one identifies with as opposed to others, and for periodically reaffirming group identity.
Many political commitments, I've noticed, could easily, in a very nearby possible world, have turned out to be the political commitments of one's supposed opponents. Take the recent insistence on the part of some Republicans that Guantanamo prisoners must not be relocated to their own home states, since this would increase the threat of terrorist attacks there, and so would compromise the safety of the average Americans they represent. But is it at all hard to imagine slightly different circumstances, in which a politician, whose public image is built upon the warrior ethic Republicans often seek to project, should wish to bring the prisoners to his home state precisely in order to show that he and his people can 'take it', that we've got things under control, etc.? Similarly, I dare say the possible world is not at all far away in which defenders of the lives of condemned prisoners or factory-farmed animals also find it coherent, or perhaps just expedient, to present themselves as concerned about the lives of unborn fetuses. In our world that's just not quite how things worked out, but it's hard to live with any degree of telescopic access to those other worlds and to remain in line with any particular group's sensibilities.
Beyond this, though, I believe there is a sort of moral calling to insist upon not going along with the daily news cycle, not posting reactions, positive or negative, to the latest ejaculation of Sarah Palin or the latest pseudo-defiant riff by Jon Stewart, as if anything really rode on this, but rather to ensure, as our culture makes its inevitable transition to the entirely digital stage of its evolution, that what came before does not get lost, that what has least of all a place in the daily news cycle nonetheless is made to have a place among the subaltern currents constituting the blogosphere. In other words, it's come to seem to me that 'blogging', if that's what it must be called, about the burial practices of the Scythians, or about illuminated manuscripts, is itself a form of resistance.
I found myself in a Moldavian convent a few years ago, in which the teenaged nuns-in-training could expound upon many of the finer points of Orthodox theology, could churn their own butter and operate their own grist-mills, but, as became apparent in conversation, had next to no idea of where, or even what, Canada is. They had committed themselves entirely to God; they were world-renouncers. I was outraged, and insisted that they were guilty of a moral failure, that any decent person will have some rough idea of how many Africans die of dysentery per year, of which countries have a nuclear arsenal, and so on. I shared with my fellow educated Westerners (and above all my fellow Canadians) the conviction that morality consisted in caring a great deal about questions like these.
But the sense has always nagged at me that the world needs --that even the chatterers about current events need-- exemplars of other ways of being. I think Tolstoy, for example, was one such sort of exemplar when he railed against reading newspapers. The world could not, I acknowledge, consist only in such exemplars: theirs is a sort of specialized labor. One way to work in their service, if not to join their ranks (for that, I take it, is only by election), is to draw attention to the worlds of people, past or present (but mostly past), who have cared about things entirely different from those that make it into the news cycle, or into the clusters of disparate commitments that have come to be publicly recognizable, for now, as the world-views of 'liberals' or 'conservatives'. Here, unlike the world of trade-paperback publishing or the pitching of scripts, one cannot defend ephemerality on the grounds that it is what sells, for blogs do not need to be sold in order to survive: they are practically free, and limited only by the imaginations of their creators.
I will almost certainly swing back again someday. My entire conscious life has involved a sort of pendular motion between engagement and retreat. When I was 16 I was greatly put off by an anti-Apartheid march in which I found myself, which ended up as a 'lie-in' in the pumping area of a Shell station: the poor, teenaged, zit-faced attendant, working alone, simply had no idea how to respond to these misplaced bodies, lying around his pumps and chanting Free South Africa, boycott Shell! My disappointment at this sight triggered the first of many retreats. I do not know what has caused the most recent one, exactly. It surely has something to do with the fact that I am no longer in my home country, which just happens to be the belly of the global news-beast, and while I do catch glimpses of Teabaggers and their ilk on CNN as I'm passing through public spaces, my sense that they are my problem diminishes with each passing year. At the same time, the thought of caring about any Canadian issue in the way I have at times cared about American issues is simply out of the question. I doubt that in the history of US-Canadian immigration any American has ever crossed over to that extent.
It might also have to do with the recent task I've taken on, to design a course in Indian philosophy, and my consequent immersion in texts of, and about, the Vedic tradition. Looking at a culture that draws such a clear distinction between the 'householders' and the 'renouncers', I certainly know where my sympathies lie. The form of religiosity that involves rituals designed to bring good fortune and money to a family, to bring a son rather than a daughter, to reaffirm caste distinctions, to win wars, is just so clearly inferior in my mind to the form of religiosity that has as its end nothing short of liberation [moksha] from all that tiresome bullshit. But I suppose what I'm looking for is a sort of middle path, one that does not reject the cycle of life, but only the cycle of news, one that pays proper respect to the world by rejecting the myopic view of the world that reigns, as they say, dans le monde.
I believe that I will now, when trying to explain the concept of moksha as the culmination of a deliberate attempt to separate the self from the cycle of samsara, refer to it as "moving to Canada".
Posted by: Picador | December 23, 2009 at 05:15 PM
In my view An enterprising person is one who comes across a pile of scrap metal and sees the making of a wonderful sculpture. An enterprising person is one who drives through an old decrepit part of town and sees a new housing development. An enterprising person is one who sees opportunity in all areas of life. To be enterprising is to keep your eyes open and your mind active. It's to be skilled enough, confident enough, creative enough and disciplined enough to seize opportunities that present themselves... regardless of the economy.
www.onlineuniversalwork.com
Posted by: Albert | December 24, 2009 at 07:08 AM