Home is not where the soil is...

...but where your soul is.

A very soothing (because it puts the brain to a bit of a sleep) talk about home and the world by Pico Iyer:

A pox on storytelling

In 1936 Walter Benjamin wrote something illuminating about the place of storytelling in Western culture. 

Storytelling is alive in traditional societies, he said, but dying a slow death in Western one's. Why? Because Western societies are being consumed by the power of information.

A little context here: Benjamin was writing against the grain of rising fascism, a social system that relied heavily on information and technology to anchor itself in Western Europe after World War I. 

Stories communicate unique truths that lie at the heart of experiences in a relatively unmediated way. An individual would tell a story of survival to another individual, or to a group gathered communally perhaps on the occasion of a death or birth. 

Information, on the other hand, is mediated because it's distributed in a more or less standardized format through technology. In Benjamin's day, the technological apparati used both by the state and business conglomerates would be the mass media.

News of death, especially deaths of soldiers in the war zones of Europe, would be transmitted; similarly stories of survival would be appropriated by the state and transmitted as narratives of triumph or heroism. 

Mourning would cease to be an occasion to share unique experiences in common physical space.

Death in this Benjaminian cosmology occupies not a place of recoil and terror, but one of renewal or creation. People would congregate around the dying or the dead and find new meaning in their lives through sharing their experiences, memories, of or around the dying subject.

The 21st century, an era allegedly of hypermodernity, is an era where storytelling is back with a vengeance. 

As fiction writer Sam Lipsyte says in a discussion of his recent New Yorker story, The Naturals, we are living in a cultural moment where everything is communicated on the back of a story: 

You don’t just buy some jam or a loaf of bread or a chair or a car. You have to hear a whole story about how the product came about, often a tedious tale about how somebody quit the rat race (after making a mint in advertising or data mining or manufacturing weapons) and discovered an old family recipe and then made friends with local farmers and woodsmen. 

The hero of the story is a "free range cultural consultant" which is an euphemism for a storyteller; his job is to help the government build structures in public spaces on the back of stories, as though it isn't just enough to build, the building project from inception to completion has to be wrapped in a story.

Lipsyte's hero rebels against the blind adoption of storytelling as the only vehicle via which the worth of experiences and products can be communicated. He refuses to be a storyteller in the story; consequence? He loses the contract.

But the kind of storytelling that is preponderant in our cultural moment is not the kind of storytelling that Benjamin mourned the loss of. Our storytelling is largely an elaborate sales pitch, of ourselves, our lives, our achievements and of course of the products we consume. 

Today's storytelling is intrinsic to sales and is indistinguishable from information whose effects Benjamin decried not too long ago. When Benjamin said "story" he didn't mean the selling of ourselves/marketing ourselves to the world; he meant seeking new dots of meaning through the telling of them regardless of how spontaneous and messy they sound. 

A person, in Benjamin's vision, might seek hilarity from death, because that is how he specifically experiences death. 

In our contemporary storytelling, we have to narrate events of death in one way and one way only, in a monotonous, monochromatic tone of solemnity. This tantamounts to the selling of death as anti-life.

Lipsyte's hero encounters death--the death of his father. He flies halfway across the country to speak to his dying father after a long interregnum of icy silence between father and son.

Indeed, in a Benjaminian way, the hero becomes the son, the one and unique son of the one and unique father, and experiences meaningful changes within himself, which by the time the story ends, he refuses to share with the readers.

A pox on storytelling.

In (silent) praise of inarticulacy

I doubt if a film like Manakamana will be seen by more than 50 people.

And that is just fine, going by the core philosophy of makers Pachao Velez and Stephanie Spray's Documentary. The philosophy seems to be that the best of thoughts may go unexpressed and thus unheard; the best of things may go unseen and the best of sounds may go unheard.

The film is about the journey pilgrims make to Manakamana, a Hindu temple in a small mountain village in Nepal. Inside the temple resides the goddess Bhagavati.

The temple is in a remote location; over time pilgrims have endured, happily so, the arduous journey to the site. Recently, they have been riding a cable car to and from the temple. The cable car is a technological insertion into nature, but the regular pilgrims are not mesmerized by the cable car. Some mumble the fact that this is the first time in their life that they are aboard a cable car. 

That's it.

The Documentary is not a homage to technology or to many aspects of modernity that we have taken for granted and feel deep lacunae when they go missing from our surrounding.

The Documentary is one that somebody like philosopher and art critic Susan Sontag would have liked: a no-frills-attached registering on our consciousness of a fleeting experience that quietly leaves its imprint on us.

Sontag had cringed at the thought of over-articulation of experiences, at the sight of tourists taking pictures of things they visit and see, at the cultural proclivity to record and note every sensation one experiences when one is in the presence of, let's say, a "wonder", man-made or natural.

The temple of Manakamana is a wonder to its pilgrims. But the pilgrims generally remain inarticulate about the wonder. Because of the cable car and other conveniences, the temple is now visited by outsiders as well. Tourists, the nemesis of a Sontagian universe, take pictures and jot down notes; there is a rock musician who jokes around and expresses cynicism. They are not looking at the temple; in essence with the noise they create, they are looking at themselves. The jokes they sprout, the cynicism they express, the notes and the photographs they take are silent echoes of themselves.

The traditional pilgrims approach the shrine with awe and ardor and leave in awe and ardor. The wonder they experience is left at that, not translated into words or into a narrative.

Can't beat a golden beet

When it's roasted and along with lettuce and tzatziki (Lebanese yogurt sauce) housed inside a pocket pita.

Quinoa queen

This ain't no ordinary skillet egg; it's egg nestled in a bed of quinoa.

Name it the "Quinoa Queen"?

Ingredients:

6 eggs

1/2 cup Quinoa

Corn Kernel

Black Bean

Onion

Garlic

Cilantro

Enchilada Sauce

T and I had it for dinner: sumptuous!

A polycentric world

Poly is a word that connotes multiplicity, i.e. many.

There's polytheism and there is polyandry.

Writer Pico Iyer gives an eloquent snapshot of a polycentric world in his book The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home:

Everywhere is so made up of everywhere else--a polycentric anagram--that I hardly notice I'm sitting in a Parisian cafe just outside Chinatown (in San Francisco), talking to a Mexican American friend about biculturalism while a Haitian woman stops off to congratulate him on a piece he's just delivered on TV on St. Patrick's Day. "I know all about those Irish nuns," she says in a thick patois, as we sip our Earl Grey tea near signs that say, CITY OF HONG KONG, EMPRESS OF CHINA.