An unusually composed Medea

Just finished watching Lars Von Trier's Medea.

From trash poem to welcome sign

Let no one say, and say it to your shame,
That all was beauty here, until you came.

A sign bearing these lines stand in Upper Manhattan's Fort Tyrone Park. They are beautiful, aren't they? asks a visitor as she finds the words to be poetic: they make her feel wanted.

She is then on a mission to track down the source of these lines. Upon Googling nothing shows up. The lines are then discovered to be fragments, carefully chiseled out of a longer early 20th-century poem:

Friend,
When you stray or sit and take your ease
On heath or hill, or under spreading trees,
Pray leave no traces of your wayside meal,
No paper bag, no scattered orange peel,
Nor daily journal littered on the grass;
Others may view these with distaste, and pass;
Let no one say, and say it to your shame,
That all was beauty here until you came.

This isn't a poem of sweet cajoling, but one with a scolding attitude, "grumpy lines" as the visitor calls them. The history of the poem is part of the burgeoning history of trash and trash talk in post-World War I Britain, a time when, liberated by rising economic fortunes and goaded by a desire to cultivate leisure, members of the British working and middle classes took to traveling from the cities to the countryside either in motor cars or on bicycles. The countryside, for so long a pristine habitat reserved for the ruminating walks of the upper class, was seen to be everybody's public space then.

Forced to contend with the despoiling of the countryside, the elite began to express deep chagrin about the litter that the lumpen visitors tended to leave behind.

In his book Landscape and Englishness, David Matless records the backlash against the new tourism which really was a backlash against the violation or a "flagrant breach of the national good form."

So, in short, the two lines that comfort the modern visitor to the Manhattan Park is in essence clipped from a longer trash poem that in class-conscious Britain had issued moral caveats.

Global Citizenship

There was a colorful din of Presentix-aided performances inside the classroom when I had asked my students to do an adult version of a show and tell: "Are You Global"? was the rubric under which each student was to do an engaging (and intellectually stimulating) multimedia presentation of whether or not they were global citizens and what did global citizenship mean to them.

The presentations had been reserved for the last two weeks of a class on the "paradoxes" of globalization. Most walked a fine balance between gravity and levity; concepts of citizenship were revisited, tweaked, defended, attacked, and one performance was particularly memorable because of its casual tossing aside of conventions; the young lady proudly claimed to be global, meaning that she has freed herself from shackles of parochial food habits that her mother, an immigrant from Serbia still clings to in their home in Northern New Jersey. "The smell of roasting pork nauseates me, and it's one reason why my dad, who's a native of the U.S. divorced my mom."

Looking back, I think, two things I wanted to highlight, were lost in the beautiful chaos. Borrowing from a wonderful term I had heard the well-known cultural critic, Gayatri Spivak (utter in her speech on the fate of an aesthetic education in the era of globalization), I had said that to become a global citizen one had to begin orienting one's most ethical of thoughts around the "Other". In the 21st century globalization of the self should ideally start by looking not Eastward, or Westward, inward or outward, but "Otherward." Most must have misheard the word as "[In] other words" and so turned glassy eyes toward me. A Glassy eye in my [pedagogical] experience means "I don't get it" with a dash of politeness.

The other thing I said was that the most global of citizens were not the students themselves, well-traveled, multilingual denizens of the privileged class, or I myself, or people like me, but the refugees, not the traditional immigrants, but the refugees, folks who resettle from their home countries to the United States (or elsewhere) out of a complex web of personal motives and historical factors.

This too went unregistered on the templates of their consciousness.