I've just spent a few moments going through the comments on the BBC website, voicing the reactions of readers to the death of Heath Ledger. Some people manage to reach levels of insensitivity I hadn't thought possible - the loose quips about him pretty much getting what he deserved for daring to be in the spotlight, the endless mentions of, 'another soldier dies in Afghanistan and will barely get paid lip service'. Others saying how shocked they are, and the responses to those asking how can you be shocked and distressed by the death of someone you don't even know - save those 'false emotions' for relatives and friends.
In the first case, I think it is acceptable to be distressed to a certain degree by the death of someone who brought you nothing but pleasure. Additionally, I am guessing that the majority of people who have been affected by Ledger's death are so not because they had any particular connection to him but rather because of the wholly unexpected nature of the event. We have a gorgeous, talented young man who - apparently - chose to take his own life. This is the aspect that people are unable to understand, that someone in his situation can be anything but happy and positive. It is naive to assume that peace comes with riches and fame, even with ambitions achieved and a glittering array of awards to prove this. Furthermore, it is naive to assume that being a father would bring him boundless joy and reasons to live. Suicide can, in such cases as this, be viewed as inherently selfish; some say it is a brave act, others that it is the gesture of cowards. The death of a solider in Afghanistan is a tragedy, but death and war go inevitably hand in hand. The shock factor cannot be the same.
My thoughts are with the little girl who will never know her father, the mother who has lost her son. With Ledger, in his last months; the final hours I imagine would be more calm and peaceful, because by then he would have made a decision and it is often that which brings peace of mind. And they are with all the other people currently in the situation he surely was - trying to grasp a hold of reality but unable to understand the evermore confusing and manic state of the world today. It is a harsh irony of the 21st century that while many of the citizens of the world are clinging desperately onto life, struggling to survive, others are apparently willingly forfeiting their right to a future. It is relevant not to look at the individuals, but at the society in which they lived. I remember writing in my dissertation to get my BA that suicide was the way some people ultimately chose to feel alive, the final slash of their wrists an assertive motion against the insanity and chaos of the world which surrounded them. We live in an increasingly violent world, knife attacks and high school shootings become a staple part of the daily news report: when are we going to stop putting all the blame on the criminal and start accepting some responsibility as being members of the same destructive society?
What is important today - getting ahead of everyone else, at whatever cost to them and, more notably, to yourself - has essentially dehumanised us. If someone heads out on a shooting spree of random strangers, it is surely because life has come to mean so little and they are desperately seeking some sort of affirmation that life is out there, that they can find a meaning after all.
I would say that Heath Ledger's death has affected me to a greater extent than Princess Diana's. Hers was a tragic life, but one for which she practically set herself up: she played with fire, and got burnt. Nobody deserves to die under dubious circumstances in a car crash, but it was an ending almost appropriate to her increasingly fantastical life. Ledger, dying alone in a New York apartment in the depths of winter, is going to leave a more indelible impression on me. I hope, with a certain degree of futility, that the world learns something from his passing.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Friday, January 11, 2008
A few odds and ends
A couple of bits and bobs that have been relevant to my world recently...
- why is it that if you don't concentrate on the words and ignore any possibility of a vague comprehension, French, Italian and Spanish people sound as if they're forever discussing the wonder of leaping into bed with somebody, yet German, Russian and Chinese people always sound as if they're conversing about the best method to clean a drain? I like being on buses in Argentina, surrounded by voices I can't understand and I can pretend they're contemplating the finer points of philosophy and love and life; I hate being on buses in Hong Kong, surrounded by voices I can't understand but are almost certainly - I'm sure of it - arguing about, well, the best method of cleaning drains... This, along with the fact the majority of HK people seem incapable of closing their mouths when eating, is something that seriously gets on my nerves over here.
- I really want to know what was so funny in the apartment below two nights ago. I was awake most of the night, inelegantly dispensing the contents of my stomach over the entire bathroom, and all I could hear (apart from my retching) was the cackles of the chick who lives downstairs from me. Now, I know I did have to leave a bedroom once because the guy was just so impossibly serious about himself and what he was doing and with so little result, the situation struck me as hilarious and I sprinted out on some bathroom-related pretext to have a damn good snigger to myself. Even I have the grace not to laugh outrageously for hours on end. The mind, in this instance, boggles.
- as I cast my eyes around the ferry this morning, doing a spot of people-watching, I observed a middle-aged western male using a teaspoon to a) stir his coffee, b) give his ear a thorughly good cleaning-out and c) relieve an itch on his back. Am I alone in finding this repulsive, or does everyone else view this as a resourceful use of a teaspoon??
- a student of mine had to write an essay that included an analysis of a poem by Chinua Achebe, 'Refugee Mother and Child'. The opening line of this incorporates the image of the Madonna and Child. While reviewing the essay for this student, who had notably ignored every single word of advice I'd given her and clearly either lost or abandoned the essay plan we'd created, I realised why I couldn't understand what on earth she was on about at one point: she'd been referring to the Madonna as the pop singer as oppose to... well, if you don't know who then please go shoot yourself. You'll be doing yourself and the rest of the world a favour. If a sixteen year old doesn't understand the most basic of Biblical references, how am I to be expected to teach them how to analyse even a Blake poem? Until now, I'd thought Blake was open and easy to interpret. Now, I'm terrified to think what she'll do with lines such as, 'the mind-forg'd manacles I hear' ('London'). I anticipate her analysis suggesting that 'mind' has forever been misspelled and it actually should be 'mine' which makes much more sense because they were mining for tin or whatever to make manacles. Mock not, I believe this is a distinct possibility she'll come up with.
- for nine days at the beginning of February, I'm hopping over to Thailand. Yes, I know I've always cackled at those who have been there, it being tourist-trap central. Hopefully, for the second part at least, I'll manage to find a place that even Lonely Planet writers haven't stumbled across yet; for the first few days, though, I get to be an uber-tourist and go play around with elephants. I can't wait. I get to wash baby elephants in a river - for me, this is something approximating a dream coming true. Even I need to employ the word 'cute' when talking about baby elephants, and that means they really must be cute, what with their hairiness and enormous eyes... everyone together now: awwwww! (I got so excited I even used an exclamation mark, you see).
- not much has been going on in my world, as is fairly evident by this post. When something happens, be assured you'll be the first to know. I've been feeling distinctly Grr of late about certain things - hence my last soewhat downbeat epic - and have spent far too much time in contemplative mode. I need to get back in touch with the world before it rushes past and forgets all about me; for some reason, it seems like a bad thing that it is Friday evening and I'm sat at home, alone, blogging about nothing. Back in the UK, I wouldn't have batted an eyelid if this were the case. What has happened to me since coming out here?? Oh dear. 'The L-Shaped Room' (Lynne Reid Banks), a slab of mozzarella, and Yann Tiersen it is. And - just to see out of curiosity if somebody in particular reads this witterage - this is VS009, over and out.
Sunday, January 6, 2008
An epic post
I fear this is going to be an uncomfortably long post: may I suggest you either break it down into a series of readings, or go get yourself a mug of cocoa, choose a decent track on the stereo, and settle down for a while. Chances are you're reading this from somewhere unreasonably cold right now so I'm doing you a favour here - giving you a reason to snuggle down in bed that little bit longer. Honestly, the things I do for you. (The things I do, however, don't extend to breaking down this marathon witter into separate postings. I just can't be bothered).
I was coming back on the ferry to Lamma the other day (actually, it was just the other day, as oppose to my usual definition of 'the other day' which can mean anything up to about fifteen years ago), pondering to myself the 'greater things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your [Horatio's] philosophy'. One of these ponderings stemmed from a New Year's blog post I put up here then took down two hours later, deciding that the world didn't need quite such ready access to my more sentimental side. I'd written something about Hope and how Hope is the great salvation of humanity: the hope that things will improve, the concept we hang onto when all about is going depressingly haywire. (To be exact, I wrote that 'it is hope that keeps us alive, the ability to dream wonderful dreams, the eternal possibility of 'perhaps'.') I disagree. Yes, I'm that argumentative I even get into debates with myself. Others who have endured arguments with me, consider that you've gotten off lightly. I've just been defending one position; when I'm arguing with myself I've got two sides to argue for. The debates can last for hours. Anyhow, I disagree because I think that hope merely prolongs the agony in many circumstances. I think the best example I can give is to present the situation when you've been in a relationship with someone and for whatever reason it has come to an end. Despite the fact they've hurt you more than you ever thought possible, if you loved them enough you cling to the hope that maybe they'll change their mind, maybe they'll come back to you some day. How on earth is Hope remotely positive in this situation? Precisely. It isn't. Hope merely prevents us from dealing; hope delays what can best be referred to as the bereavement process. There are families out there who have had sons and daughters die in Iraq and yet for various ghastly reasons a body has not been returned, the death is merely reported and expected to be believed; how can a mother mourn the loss of a son when she has no definite evidence of his death? Always there will be a faint glimmer of hope shining somewhere in her heart, that maybe the authorities 'got it wrong', perhaps it wasn't her son who died at all. She thereafter faces a lifetime of accentuated agony.
For those of you who know your philosophy, you'll know this is not an original thought. I didn't realise that at the time, to be honest, but I did a few hours later after a spot of googling on the subject. It seems that Nietzsche beat me to the concept when he wrote that 'hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torments of man'. Does this invalidate the thought processes I went through to reach my conclusions? That someone else Got There First? Another internal debate raged for a few days, before I came to the firm decision that No, it doesn't. If anything, it serves to strengthen it that someone as respected as Nietzsche agrees with me.
Which leads me on to another argument I had with somebody else the other day - not one of my other personalities, a separate person entirely. He pointed out that in my post about Dating I made the comment toward the end that 'life is... a banquet in a room of chandeliers and elegance when this is beyond your means', which is essentially me re-phrasing Oscar Wilde's, 'anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.' For one, this was not a particularly pertinent observation since firstly this is one of Wilde's more well-known sayings, and for two, I clearly have a lot of interest in what Wilde had to say because I have a bunch of his quotations listed on my blog. (Furthermore, as I pointed out in the argument, if you're going to accuse me of stealing an idea from someone, at least accuse me of stealing it from the Ancient Greeks who almost certainly had thoughts along these lines, borrowed throughout the centuries by multiple others including our friend Mr Wilde). Philosophers and idealists have always used another's ideas to present their own: it adds to a defence, it strengthens an argument. Take the ideas of the first English feminists (on which I should be something of an expert, so if anyone is going to dispute any of this post please don't bother to focus on this particular segment): Mary Astell borrowed - intentionally - from Descartes and his, 'I think, therefore I am' to promote the philosophy that men and women are more than the sum of their bodily parts. It is such thinking, used under slightly different conditions, that has led to my female readers occupying the positions they currently are in society. In other words: be damn grateful that people mercilessly steal 'intellectual property' from others.
Bringing me oh so neatly onto another point (do you begin to believe me now that I really can rattle off a fairly viable essay in three hours flat?), specifically, that I'm fed up with the way women complain about their current position in society. They want it All - whatever the heck All is meant to represent. And for those looking to comment on this post, I don't want to read a single response that says they disagree with this viewpoint; I am so bored of hearing all the thoughts along the lines of, 'but women still earn less than men do in such and such a job'. Who the hell cares, you're earning a damn fortune so shut your trap and be glad of it. As Fromm tells us, women and men are fundamentally different and we should celebrate the differences rather than spend our lives trying to convince the world we are one and the same. For God's sake, we live in a world where a single female can make a choice to move from the UK to Hong Kong and within three months she is there, living in her own apartment, paying her own bills, making her own way in the world. I know, I've just done it. The world is one giant oyster there for the taking, it is whether you choose to or not that makes the difference.
In another recent conversation, it was pointed out to be me that I can't possibly be Happy: I'm living on my own on the other side of the world (for the record, it is now YOU living on the other side of the world actually...), distinctly lacking in anything approximating a relationship with a guy. Just because one person's definition of Happy incorporates the bizarre need to be permanently partnered up with another doesn't mean that applies to everyone. I wont deny that I've been in relationships that have made me overwhelmingly happy, but all of them bar none have also resulted in me reaching depths of unhappiness you never think is quite possible until you're there. Whether I've ended it or the other has, it always, always, hurts like hell. And the worst thing is, that hurt never goes away, it just gets loosely placed into another section of your mind, always there and waiting to be woken up by a piece of music, a work of art, a scent of aftershave - something that transports you back to all those other emotions. Thus the happiness of relationships has always, for me, been irrevocably linked with an unhappiness that makes me feel, at times, as though I'm living a life where I'm just waiting for the pain to start again.
I finally read Plath's, 'The Bell Jar'. This should be enforced reading for every adolescent girl; I wish I'd read the book ten years ago because it would have made some of the hellish times seem a little more manageable. The bell jar, the claustrophobic cover that Plath creates to describe her feelings as a woman endeavouring to make just one decision, any decision, a decision that satisfies herself rather than just her college professors or her mother or some guy. 'How did I know that some day - at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere - the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?' The thing is, I know that the bell jar is merely hovering above me, following my every move, waiting to be lowered into place once more. I know it is there, I feel its presence, its possibility.
'What are you running from?' It is a question pretty much everyone has asked me at some point. I'm running from my past, I'm trying to out-run my memories and all the triggers that go along with them. And I know that this is impossible, I've figured that much, but in general I do a pretty good job. So much so that on occasion I will do something like allow a guy into my heart once more, set myself up for what is supposed to be a lifetime of happiness only to have it result in that bell jar being lowered mockingly once again. And this is why Hope is such a killer: Hope is responsible for the height at which my bell jar hovers, for allowing it to be lifted temporarily and then crashed back into place.
None of these ideas are original, but together they make up my philosophy. If you don't like it, I seriously don't want to hear about it. My version of happiness is not yours; my concept of what is real and what is false is at odds with yours. I know most of you come here to read something that makes you chuckle as you wade through an endless sea of paperwork, something to lighten a dull day: my aim is merely to make you think. If I can write something that triggers any emotion - be it happiness and laughter or contemplation and sighs - then my work here is done.
Yeats: 'Tread softly, for you tread on my dreams.'
I was coming back on the ferry to Lamma the other day (actually, it was just the other day, as oppose to my usual definition of 'the other day' which can mean anything up to about fifteen years ago), pondering to myself the 'greater things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your [Horatio's] philosophy'. One of these ponderings stemmed from a New Year's blog post I put up here then took down two hours later, deciding that the world didn't need quite such ready access to my more sentimental side. I'd written something about Hope and how Hope is the great salvation of humanity: the hope that things will improve, the concept we hang onto when all about is going depressingly haywire. (To be exact, I wrote that 'it is hope that keeps us alive, the ability to dream wonderful dreams, the eternal possibility of 'perhaps'.') I disagree. Yes, I'm that argumentative I even get into debates with myself. Others who have endured arguments with me, consider that you've gotten off lightly. I've just been defending one position; when I'm arguing with myself I've got two sides to argue for. The debates can last for hours. Anyhow, I disagree because I think that hope merely prolongs the agony in many circumstances. I think the best example I can give is to present the situation when you've been in a relationship with someone and for whatever reason it has come to an end. Despite the fact they've hurt you more than you ever thought possible, if you loved them enough you cling to the hope that maybe they'll change their mind, maybe they'll come back to you some day. How on earth is Hope remotely positive in this situation? Precisely. It isn't. Hope merely prevents us from dealing; hope delays what can best be referred to as the bereavement process. There are families out there who have had sons and daughters die in Iraq and yet for various ghastly reasons a body has not been returned, the death is merely reported and expected to be believed; how can a mother mourn the loss of a son when she has no definite evidence of his death? Always there will be a faint glimmer of hope shining somewhere in her heart, that maybe the authorities 'got it wrong', perhaps it wasn't her son who died at all. She thereafter faces a lifetime of accentuated agony.
For those of you who know your philosophy, you'll know this is not an original thought. I didn't realise that at the time, to be honest, but I did a few hours later after a spot of googling on the subject. It seems that Nietzsche beat me to the concept when he wrote that 'hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torments of man'. Does this invalidate the thought processes I went through to reach my conclusions? That someone else Got There First? Another internal debate raged for a few days, before I came to the firm decision that No, it doesn't. If anything, it serves to strengthen it that someone as respected as Nietzsche agrees with me.
Which leads me on to another argument I had with somebody else the other day - not one of my other personalities, a separate person entirely. He pointed out that in my post about Dating I made the comment toward the end that 'life is... a banquet in a room of chandeliers and elegance when this is beyond your means', which is essentially me re-phrasing Oscar Wilde's, 'anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.' For one, this was not a particularly pertinent observation since firstly this is one of Wilde's more well-known sayings, and for two, I clearly have a lot of interest in what Wilde had to say because I have a bunch of his quotations listed on my blog. (Furthermore, as I pointed out in the argument, if you're going to accuse me of stealing an idea from someone, at least accuse me of stealing it from the Ancient Greeks who almost certainly had thoughts along these lines, borrowed throughout the centuries by multiple others including our friend Mr Wilde). Philosophers and idealists have always used another's ideas to present their own: it adds to a defence, it strengthens an argument. Take the ideas of the first English feminists (on which I should be something of an expert, so if anyone is going to dispute any of this post please don't bother to focus on this particular segment): Mary Astell borrowed - intentionally - from Descartes and his, 'I think, therefore I am' to promote the philosophy that men and women are more than the sum of their bodily parts. It is such thinking, used under slightly different conditions, that has led to my female readers occupying the positions they currently are in society. In other words: be damn grateful that people mercilessly steal 'intellectual property' from others.
Bringing me oh so neatly onto another point (do you begin to believe me now that I really can rattle off a fairly viable essay in three hours flat?), specifically, that I'm fed up with the way women complain about their current position in society. They want it All - whatever the heck All is meant to represent. And for those looking to comment on this post, I don't want to read a single response that says they disagree with this viewpoint; I am so bored of hearing all the thoughts along the lines of, 'but women still earn less than men do in such and such a job'. Who the hell cares, you're earning a damn fortune so shut your trap and be glad of it. As Fromm tells us, women and men are fundamentally different and we should celebrate the differences rather than spend our lives trying to convince the world we are one and the same. For God's sake, we live in a world where a single female can make a choice to move from the UK to Hong Kong and within three months she is there, living in her own apartment, paying her own bills, making her own way in the world. I know, I've just done it. The world is one giant oyster there for the taking, it is whether you choose to or not that makes the difference.
In another recent conversation, it was pointed out to be me that I can't possibly be Happy: I'm living on my own on the other side of the world (for the record, it is now YOU living on the other side of the world actually...), distinctly lacking in anything approximating a relationship with a guy. Just because one person's definition of Happy incorporates the bizarre need to be permanently partnered up with another doesn't mean that applies to everyone. I wont deny that I've been in relationships that have made me overwhelmingly happy, but all of them bar none have also resulted in me reaching depths of unhappiness you never think is quite possible until you're there. Whether I've ended it or the other has, it always, always, hurts like hell. And the worst thing is, that hurt never goes away, it just gets loosely placed into another section of your mind, always there and waiting to be woken up by a piece of music, a work of art, a scent of aftershave - something that transports you back to all those other emotions. Thus the happiness of relationships has always, for me, been irrevocably linked with an unhappiness that makes me feel, at times, as though I'm living a life where I'm just waiting for the pain to start again.
I finally read Plath's, 'The Bell Jar'. This should be enforced reading for every adolescent girl; I wish I'd read the book ten years ago because it would have made some of the hellish times seem a little more manageable. The bell jar, the claustrophobic cover that Plath creates to describe her feelings as a woman endeavouring to make just one decision, any decision, a decision that satisfies herself rather than just her college professors or her mother or some guy. 'How did I know that some day - at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere - the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?' The thing is, I know that the bell jar is merely hovering above me, following my every move, waiting to be lowered into place once more. I know it is there, I feel its presence, its possibility.
'What are you running from?' It is a question pretty much everyone has asked me at some point. I'm running from my past, I'm trying to out-run my memories and all the triggers that go along with them. And I know that this is impossible, I've figured that much, but in general I do a pretty good job. So much so that on occasion I will do something like allow a guy into my heart once more, set myself up for what is supposed to be a lifetime of happiness only to have it result in that bell jar being lowered mockingly once again. And this is why Hope is such a killer: Hope is responsible for the height at which my bell jar hovers, for allowing it to be lifted temporarily and then crashed back into place.
None of these ideas are original, but together they make up my philosophy. If you don't like it, I seriously don't want to hear about it. My version of happiness is not yours; my concept of what is real and what is false is at odds with yours. I know most of you come here to read something that makes you chuckle as you wade through an endless sea of paperwork, something to lighten a dull day: my aim is merely to make you think. If I can write something that triggers any emotion - be it happiness and laughter or contemplation and sighs - then my work here is done.
Yeats: 'Tread softly, for you tread on my dreams.'
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