Aphorism from Abroad

Your best rival is your past self.

Internal Monologue

I know...let's float! (Je ne plaisante pas.)

Look at the picture. Look at the shadows on the balloons, look!

Regardez !

Image courtesy of www.clusterballoon.org.

On Why I Long for Southeast Asia

• The existence of chili
• The warm air
• Greens, so many greens, on the plate as well as outside
• Ah! multicultural desu ne.
• Well, I haven't been to most places in S.E. Asia, so I should not generalize
• I haven't seen, let alone experienced, how some people live
• But you know
• You know...
• Dark history, you feel it in the window panes
• China, Arabia, India. Europe. Japan. Neighbors. Les indigènes.
• Tiles, oh, tiles!
• Plants grow, oh, plants.
• Rivers are not clear
• Am I simply longing for the expat life?
• Perhaps.
• You know how FOREX works, don't you?
• There is some guilt involved
• O false sense of security, of understanding and communion
• O!
• The darkened, flickering fluorescent lights
• Oh, if we were audacious enough to attribute an at-the-end-of-the-day philosophy to S.E. Asia, I think it could be: Do not sweat the small stuff!
• What do you think?
• The message is: You know, we are on earth, here & now
• People are not looking!
• Even if they were...meh! Hello? Why care? Please be more practical.
• I need to learn that. I mean it.
• MPH (Malaysia)
  
• Gamelan (Indonesia)
• The open air, not in the colonial sense, though...but perhaps a little bit, I don't know
• The smell of morning
• Frozen takoyaki from Japan, that's just nostalgia, or double/triple nostalgia
• Made-in-Thailand ice cream
• Mmm...orange!
• Fading colors
• Concrete blocks
• You don't feel so lost, even if you are
• Scatter, like islands
• Like islands, scatter
• And watch the sea, trees. If not the sea, hills. Dark and light hills. Towers. Dream.
• Where is New York anyway? Lolo said: "To me, my navel is the center of the universe. To you, it may be different." Lolo added: "Don't think that there is only one map of the world." Then Lolo and her friends said in their hearts: "There are many." Lolo then added: "So don't be confused. Time, too, follows no uniform rules. Time does not wear school uniforms, for sure." Lolo said she learned this while being a resident in Southeast Asia. Or so I thought.
• Oh oh, never mind.... Well. It's just impossible making a list of your really favorite things.

The Incomparables

Let us trace the incomparable through:

Metaphor-linguistics-trauma-psychology-nation-history-religion-philosophy-translation-education-nature-nurture-science-politico-disciplines-food-palate-palette-colors-cultures-money-indigo-blue.

The Beyond in Education

The world is, after all, beyond college,

Beyond school.

Scholarship is in the service of the world beyond,

(Not the misleadingly-named "real-world," but the sordid, anarchic world of the everyday, full of bills, full of worries, also of memories, letters, love, confusion, trash bags, poetry, amnesia, skin problems, babies, old people, calendars, quarrels, peace, internal monologues, solitude, misunderstanding, pride, other people's pride, hazing, paranoia, gluttony, hunger, helplessness, charitable feelings, lots of toothpaste, trees, breathlessness, fatigue, congee, telephone calls, news, growth, thoughts, food, toilet breaks, both real and unreal)

And education in schools is a skylight to heaven;

School is not the heaven itself.

Go out, go deep -

School is your home, your resting place,

Your inn: a bed and a meal, on your way to a new place,

To difference, to storms, to the stars.

The guiding light is always the what? The sky ~

Dig into the sky.

*So, the argument should not be about whether education ought to prepare students for the world out there, which incidentally includes the worlds inside. Of course it ought to. The real debate should focus instead on what that preparation means, not just for the students, but for parents, teachers, and all others. For example, someone might say studying art history doesn't prepare students for the world beyond. A proponent of art history may respond by arguing that education isn't all about usefulness. But that's not the point. Art history is useful! For life! Don't you know how colors and shapes can fire up your life, cheer you up? And through art history, we learn that our vision isn't something that's completely naturally given. How liberating such knowledge can be! So yes, it's just that there are lots of different kinds of usefulness. The question isn't about utilitarianism versus non. You know, utilities aren't just about electricity, gas, and water. Or food. They're also about strength, tolerance, understanding. And versions of truth. To put it another way, usefulness isn't just about usefulness. It's about importance. What's important to you? To us? Sometimes, we are tempted to prioritize, assigning ranks by order of importance. But why bother? Why not concentrate on enlarging our ark, so that cut-off lists are no longer relevant? When we can't hold anymore, let's acknowledge our limit head-on, instead of cutting things off and pretending as if they never existed. Let's acknowledge our narrow bandwidth, if it is really narrow, and fully, verily confront its narrowness.

Pettrie Trips

Pettrie tripped over her trip

Tripping, tipping, point

On her way

The other way

The others' ways

Tripping over her trip

Pettrie jump-ropes over the clouds

Mr. Dove-Mountain, Be Grand

I just posted on the Japanese prime minister, Mr. Hatoyama's Twitter. Hatoyama means "Dove-Mountain," by the way. Love thy dove. What a name!

Do doves twitter?

In any case, I asked him, Mr. Dove-Mountain, to present a clearer and more concrete view of Japan's future. Like, a more focused vision for comprehensive decentralization. Decentralization and breaking apart the bureaucracy have been mentioned before, but everything seems to be so rushed and exist only for short-term gains, if any gains at all. There's nothing grand about it. And grand shan't mean over-simplified. Grand things can be very complex, and yet still grand. And grand shan't mean easy, glamorous, or showy.

For Japan, grand shall mean quite the opposite of: easy, glamorous, & showy. More like grace than grand, perhaps. It needs to learn to step down. From second to third, and further down. It needs to learn to downsize. To grow older but happier. It needs to accept its marginal destiny. It needs to learn English and Chinese. Languages, I mean. (Look at the Scandinavians, peek at them, steal furtive glances at them, who speak such excellent English. You know, Chinese is to Korean and Japanese, perhaps Vietnamese, too, as English is to Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, or even Finnish, pretty much.) Be well-versed in Anglo-American, Chinese, and Indian-subcontinental cultures. (That can be accomplished with the knowledge of just two languages: English and Chinese.) It needs to expand its horizons. And stop being so impractical. For once!

Japan is experiencing a mid-life crisis. It's not seeing things very clearly. It's unable to look beyond itself. Unable and unwilling to acknowledge the heaps and heaps of debt.

Mr. Dove-Moutain, you are actually a Mr. Debt-Mountain. Mounds and mounds...of debt! Please, don't accumulate more debt. Doves are lovely, but any more debt is not. Please realize this. And please be grand. Not glitzy-grand, but solid-grand.

Thanks for the Twitter, though. At least, in this country, no one gets arrested for twittering in front of the prime minister, oh dove!

Happy New Year!

I am going away on a brief New Year's trip to Singapore and Malaysia.

Happy 2010!!!

The Foreign Student

Yes yes, so he was from an affluent family. Well-endowed, eh?

Nice nice, so he studied in London. For four years!

And he lived in a beautiful neighborhood! A student in a beautiful apartment?

But please, don't assume his life was devoid of anxiety, misery, or, even poverty.

Yes, poverty.
(And poverty, is an emotional condition. It would be wrong to assume that it was a material condition. Yes, it can have material causes. Very possibly. But the condition itself is really an emotional state.)

Don't you know how badly some foreign students can suffer from incurable cases of the inferiority complex? Oh, so mired in so much pain and anguish?

Even if you are rich in one country, you can be a nobody in another. Easy to understand, but no, you would never want to experience this.

And I'd hate to say this, but it's true. The inferiority complex is first and foremost for students coming to the metropole from the margins. (It can happen to students going the other way, but hey, what do they know? is my honest opinion.)

Oh, but of course, he should have dealt with his inferiority complex in a much, much, much better way. Oh!

That's why I am so frustrated.

I know, or I think I know, the foreign student's misery. His loneliness.

But the one who studied in London, he failed to understand that the Problem was inside of him, not outside in the world of U.S. tanks and suicide bombers.

His version of Islam, if it can be called that, was not spiritual at all. It was so materialist and image-ridden. Oh! That is not what any religion, or religious experience, is all about.

One knows that prayer, meditation, communication...these have to do with the spirit. Not chemicals! Not planes! Not guns! Not even guts.

It's complicated....

Ah, maybe I am assuming too much.

A Wavering Person

Grigri asked: "I am a wavering person. And you?"

Play as Well as You Can

"Play as well as you can."

That's what Maude said in Harold and Maude, a movie I adore and come back to time and time again.

Here is the full movie, from Google Videos. Please watch it, if you have the time:

Harold and Maude (1971)

Dir. by Harold Ashby. Written by Colin Higgins.

91 mins.



Another work of art that has had a profound influence on me, to the point of being almost harmful, is Somerset Maugham's Moon and Sixpence.

Coyote's Christmas

"coyote des neiges" is a favorite blog of mine, which I came across a few months ago by chance. The blog's author, a French-Canadian, is humorous and knowledgeable, without ever sounding presumptuous. In her recent blog entry, she writes about spending Christmas alone. Christmas is supposed to be a time of gathering, cheer, and parties, but she says, this year, she is going to be by herself. She sniffs: oh, solitude! ah, solitude! Then she looks in the thesaurus and starts listing all the synonyms of "solitude," like abandonment, recluse, exile, isolation, separation, dereliction, Thebaide.... She humorously adds that she didn't recognize the last two. "But wait," she says. "There are more synonyms than just those." She then ingeniously puts together a second list of synonyms that include: cocoon, shelter, a place of rest, den, refuge, oasis, peace. After all, she lives in snow country, where, yes, it is better to stay inside, and even be a little bit misanthrope.

Yeah! I think even if one didn't live in snow country, one is allowed to celebrate and have a merry Solitude (read: Peace, Refuge, Oasis...).

Here is the blog's URL: http://coyote-des-neiges.blogspot.com/. Her entry on her New Year's eve in Paris was also hilarious and very well-written! And so was her entry on public toilets, or her fear thereof.

Joyeux Noël !

Moonlight

Moonlight

Is graffiti

Covering the wall

Today

Yes, and I found

The biggest lie

Sustaining my life

Today the eyes

Have been opened

Maybe the ears, too

Oh years!

Timbuktu

Like Timbuktu

Cities contributing to scholarship

Unite:

Do not be overshadowed by the Olympics

Transmission and preservation

Do take time, and lives, so many lives

And generations

It does take learning to know

That preservation means renewal

That culture means food and nurturing

(Not headaches!)

Dominguez says: "If time travel were available,

I would travel to Timbuktu in the 12th century."

Yorokobi says: "Yes, and be an auditor at the

University of Sankoré!"

The East

Rage raging, snow falling

Probing probes

Too fatigued for memory's sake

Shallowness, borrowed speech

Eyes, condemning

Lips, apart

Paper. Covers. Desk. And.

I. Have. Nowhere. To Sit.

Peace

Well, yes, peace is weak. Very weak. Like people.

I am Anti-Justification

Hello? Konnichiwa.

There is no just war.

Absolutely none. But yes, police action does sometimes become necessary. In that case, why not call it 'covert operations' like a good U.S. president? I happen to prefer lies and stealth to wars. Wars are lies and stealth anyway, but I hate how every war needs justification. Covert operations, on the other hand, are inherently unjustified and have something undoubtedly wrong about them, so needs no justification in the first place. Well, enough sarcasm. But there is probably something terribly wrong with anything that needs a lot of justification. That I know. Haha. Can't laugh.

Unfortunately, wars are profitable. But so are other things....

Need an outlet? Please play sports. Or games. Or instruments. You can kick soccer balls, but not people's heads. You can molest the piano keys all you want (well, even that only to a certain point), but not people's sensibilities.

Need goals? Have you read all the biographies in your nearest library? If so, I'm sure you can find more on Amazon.com.

Need money? Yes, more money has to go into education. Not just tuition, but also living expenses while people study.

Bravery? Then do not make war, go to war, or try to justify any war. Brave people do not fight. They think and feel. Learn that they are not immortal. Understand and accept that their lives and values are actually neither heavier nor lighter than the others'.

But not to say that we are small. We are big. Big problems, big hearts. But so are other people and their problems, their hearts.

So there. You can't have everything. Justify, or lose. "I choose lose," Metty said. But she added, "And it isn't even losing." But yes, once you are in that mindset, it's hard to tell the difference between winning and losing.

There is no evil in the world. There is only the perception of evil. Now that, is everywhere.

Children's Library

A must in any town, any village.

Social Class and Culture

Class, as in social rank, is a truly self-defeating concept. Do you think "class" really exists in reality as it is talked about? How much of it is delusional? There is definitely inequality in terms of money, material possessions, and access to services and opportunities. But how much of that really determines the way people live? It's more the imaginary associations and feelings of entitlement or non-entitlement that are at the basis of action and thought. Advantages and disadvantages exist purely in the subjective realm; it is all but impossible to analyze what truly gives someone an edge. In a way, wealth and poverty are both curses. But within those curses also exist, like blades of grass in a rock-field, virtues. They need to be cultivated, though, those virtues. They will not grown on their own. Hence, culture. One can blame everything on class, as one can blame everything on race, gender, nationality. But what really matters is one's own ability to recognize the budding sprouts on the terrain on which one happens to find oneself (any terrain is a rough terrain, if you are on it). That's culture. Culture is not about family pedigree or socioeconopolitimetridevelopedevelopinginnercityrannical status. Similarly, class inequality is not about the average per capita income and the high school drop-out rate. It has to do instead with a displacement and misdirection of various discontentments and feeling of self-aggrandizement or diminution all across the board. It's all very phantasmagoric and symbolic. Mushy and shifty stuff, like light and sounds (art, music, that kind of thing). If only we were able to respect others in all walks of life (one person can be walking more than one walk at a time), and talk to each other in a straightforward way. Oh, superiority/inferiority complex! Oh, frankness! Oh, culture! By the way, there is no high or low culture. Do a somersault, and you'll see why.

Keeping Track

German, Chinese.

DDDRussian, Korean.

DDDDDDPersian, Arabic.

DDDDDDDDDSwedish, Vietnamese.

Latin.

DDDSpanish, Portuguese.

Snails

You know that toilet bowls really are shells,

And so are bath tubs, wash basins, and yes, even plates.

Cups, too, and pitchers,

Glassware and silverware,

You also carry your mind in a shell, too. The skull, yes?

The shell, the shells, the shelling shelly-shell.

The wondrous magic of the spiral, this holiday season: Cheers!

Slow Thinking (2)

Detours, I mean.

Slow Thinking

Slow thinking is my life;

That's how I would like to live.

Slow thought,

The beauty you notice,

Less glare.

Cannot catch up,

But can catch.

Can slip,

But cannot slip away.

(Can slip, because of the slow, slow, slowness.)

Moving, but slowly: a snail.

Instead of something quicker, much too quick actually, as in, say:

123456789101112131415161718192021222324

Because you might get:

(Images courtesy of "3'' Mini-Block Swap Archive," alanandmike.com)