Monday, November 27, 2006
Of Fetishism and Football
There are scientists who aver that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, our senses play a three card trick with reality. If you turn the pasteboard rectangle of existence over, it reveals - nothing. Life, as many an eastern sage discovers, is illusion. There are scientists (not necessarily the same ones) who affirm that emotions prefigure events and in some sense cause them. They are not the fall-out from our experiences that we might believe them to be.
These two motifs may together explain the strange phenomenon of fetishism - that absurd devotion to the trivial that raises it to an almost holy significance. How else can one explain people's fixations with garden gnomes, stamps, shoes, trains, buttons, stars, gods and the devil unless one posits that they are delusions engineered by the firings of unthinking neural networks? They can only be self-defying con tricks, nesting resonantly alongside everything else, in the great illusion of existence. These obscure, unpremeditated mental gymnastics lead us to become collectors, stalkers, fetishists, fanatics - all of them faithful disciples of the absurd. The flashes and claps of thunder, crackling and banging along our mental pathways, project upon our consciousness obsessive longings and desires that give rise to an all-consuming intensity.
In a universe devoid of intelligent design, fetishism is just another crude signpost pointing to how meaningless everything actually is.
Yet even as I suffer the pains and tribulations of waiting for a final whistle, praying that my black and white striped team hold on for a Premiership victory, the fact of its total meaningless triviality is lost in the chaotic forces that flood me and drown out my reason.
There are scientists who aver that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, our senses play a three card trick with reality. If you turn the pasteboard rectangle of existence over, it reveals - nothing. Life, as many an eastern sage discovers, is illusion. There are scientists (not necessarily the same ones) who affirm that emotions prefigure events and in some sense cause them. They are not the fall-out from our experiences that we might believe them to be.
These two motifs may together explain the strange phenomenon of fetishism - that absurd devotion to the trivial that raises it to an almost holy significance. How else can one explain people's fixations with garden gnomes, stamps, shoes, trains, buttons, stars, gods and the devil unless one posits that they are delusions engineered by the firings of unthinking neural networks? They can only be self-defying con tricks, nesting resonantly alongside everything else, in the great illusion of existence. These obscure, unpremeditated mental gymnastics lead us to become collectors, stalkers, fetishists, fanatics - all of them faithful disciples of the absurd. The flashes and claps of thunder, crackling and banging along our mental pathways, project upon our consciousness obsessive longings and desires that give rise to an all-consuming intensity.
In a universe devoid of intelligent design, fetishism is just another crude signpost pointing to how meaningless everything actually is.
Yet even as I suffer the pains and tribulations of waiting for a final whistle, praying that my black and white striped team hold on for a Premiership victory, the fact of its total meaningless triviality is lost in the chaotic forces that flood me and drown out my reason.
Labels: Fetishism
Monday, November 20, 2006
Community
Whenever I encounter the word community being used in the media I have a picture of being proffered a shiny sugar coated gaudily wrapped sweet by a smiling stranger with emotionless eyes. An ersatz sweetener that contains no gram at all of sustenance. It has become the ubiquitous term that is reached for when a certain mass of the population are to be embraced by a collective noun. It is a many handled vessel into which, if race is the issue, can be poured, Muslim, Afro-Caribbean, Hindu, Sikh or Jew. Each one is depicted as a community. If the odds are high enough they can all be coalesced into black. The word is equally durable as a means of expressing groups of the poor white working class, the Welsh, the artistic or the scientific. On the other hand we don't apply the term community to those who exist on the edges of conformity; freedom fighter, terrorist, hoodie, rapper, rocker or green activist... It is a binding noun to include those with whom there can be political negotiation, one which conjures an illusion of potential interdependence and togetherness.
Its political purpose is to define a group of people within a population. Once thus defined, individual spokepersons can be selected to represent this homogeneous mass. They speak for the group. Dialogue with power can then appear to take place.
Yet, when we examine any such group we find no such bonding, no comprehensive agreement on attitude, belief or approach, just heterogeneous units of idiosyncratic individuals who might share one or two characteristics such as religion, colour of skin, race or work profile. There is no such thing as the Muslim community, the Jewish community, the white community or even the local community because there is no such thing as community.
We all have shifting interests and allegiances, contradictory beliefs and behaviours. We must learn to be more active in expressing our individuality so that we broaden and enrich the political debate, at whatever level and stop the self-aggrandising posturing of these so called community representatives and the easy gloss with which politicians and media hacks interact with them.
Whenever I encounter the word community being used in the media I have a picture of being proffered a shiny sugar coated gaudily wrapped sweet by a smiling stranger with emotionless eyes. An ersatz sweetener that contains no gram at all of sustenance. It has become the ubiquitous term that is reached for when a certain mass of the population are to be embraced by a collective noun. It is a many handled vessel into which, if race is the issue, can be poured, Muslim, Afro-Caribbean, Hindu, Sikh or Jew. Each one is depicted as a community. If the odds are high enough they can all be coalesced into black. The word is equally durable as a means of expressing groups of the poor white working class, the Welsh, the artistic or the scientific. On the other hand we don't apply the term community to those who exist on the edges of conformity; freedom fighter, terrorist, hoodie, rapper, rocker or green activist... It is a binding noun to include those with whom there can be political negotiation, one which conjures an illusion of potential interdependence and togetherness.
Its political purpose is to define a group of people within a population. Once thus defined, individual spokepersons can be selected to represent this homogeneous mass. They speak for the group. Dialogue with power can then appear to take place.
Yet, when we examine any such group we find no such bonding, no comprehensive agreement on attitude, belief or approach, just heterogeneous units of idiosyncratic individuals who might share one or two characteristics such as religion, colour of skin, race or work profile. There is no such thing as the Muslim community, the Jewish community, the white community or even the local community because there is no such thing as community.
We all have shifting interests and allegiances, contradictory beliefs and behaviours. We must learn to be more active in expressing our individuality so that we broaden and enrich the political debate, at whatever level and stop the self-aggrandising posturing of these so called community representatives and the easy gloss with which politicians and media hacks interact with them.
Labels: Community? I think not...
Monday, November 13, 2006
Imperfection and Blame
It transpired, the other day, that British Gas had managed to do what my genetic mapping had failed to do for over sixty years. It had given me a completely new identity, including gender. I had become Anthea Saimon; this, despite BG being the recipient of four years of direct debit under my better known, masculine persona. As always happens, a train of thought developed. The first station it stopped at was one that embodied the flights of hypocrisy of politicians, leaders, media hacks and celebrities; those often pock-marked standard bearers of righteousness. Thence it slithered further down the rails through an every day deluge of faultiness, ineptitude, error, excess and miscommunication that befall us on our daily round from home to work and back again.
The journey was a well worn one. It had the tedium of familiarity clackety clacketing through it. People, it chuntered, often seem to have a high propensity for low competence. They can miss deadlines, evade difficult challenges, underperform regularly and, yet, taken overall, seem pleased to 'get by'. This may be at work, at home, at leisure, as a parent, a worker or a friend. Wherever we look for evidence, from the Big Picture - the way we treat the planet - to the Little Picture, the way we manage the seconds, minutes, hours and days of our lives, we see imperfection, obsolescence, approximation and, at best, a partial sense of attainment. In human enterprise, excellence is rare, perfection a mirage.
Why then do we constantly cavil at everything around us?
It is because we are flawed but don't wish to face it. To do so would be to admit that we will never close the gap between who we would like to be and who we are. So we fulminate against the world, making so much noise that we cannot hear our self-critical thoughts. It is our condition. The miracle is that, either individually or in groups or in societies, we get anything done at all.
Of course it is hard to cope with this realpolitik in our personalities. We prefer our glossed-over fantasies of who we are and what we can do.
Lack of self-awareness is the greatest curse of the human condition.
It transpired, the other day, that British Gas had managed to do what my genetic mapping had failed to do for over sixty years. It had given me a completely new identity, including gender. I had become Anthea Saimon; this, despite BG being the recipient of four years of direct debit under my better known, masculine persona. As always happens, a train of thought developed. The first station it stopped at was one that embodied the flights of hypocrisy of politicians, leaders, media hacks and celebrities; those often pock-marked standard bearers of righteousness. Thence it slithered further down the rails through an every day deluge of faultiness, ineptitude, error, excess and miscommunication that befall us on our daily round from home to work and back again.
The journey was a well worn one. It had the tedium of familiarity clackety clacketing through it. People, it chuntered, often seem to have a high propensity for low competence. They can miss deadlines, evade difficult challenges, underperform regularly and, yet, taken overall, seem pleased to 'get by'. This may be at work, at home, at leisure, as a parent, a worker or a friend. Wherever we look for evidence, from the Big Picture - the way we treat the planet - to the Little Picture, the way we manage the seconds, minutes, hours and days of our lives, we see imperfection, obsolescence, approximation and, at best, a partial sense of attainment. In human enterprise, excellence is rare, perfection a mirage.
Why then do we constantly cavil at everything around us?
It is because we are flawed but don't wish to face it. To do so would be to admit that we will never close the gap between who we would like to be and who we are. So we fulminate against the world, making so much noise that we cannot hear our self-critical thoughts. It is our condition. The miracle is that, either individually or in groups or in societies, we get anything done at all.
Of course it is hard to cope with this realpolitik in our personalities. We prefer our glossed-over fantasies of who we are and what we can do.
Lack of self-awareness is the greatest curse of the human condition.
Labels: Imperfection and Blame....
Monday, November 06, 2006
Vierzon, France November 2006.
I own a small mountain house close to the Spanish border. It's a long drive from wherever you might want to land on French shores. I often go via Dieppe and choose a half way point to spend the night. Last week I had trouble finding a hotel because of French school holidays and was directed to Vierzon to stay at L'Arche. Normally I would prefer an old, small, family run business. This is what I found:
The hotel was in a new 'Place' and looked kitsch from the outside. Bizarre lighting and lots of Disneyesque concrete and glass. Inside was a decor that seemed to issue from the mind of an obsessive collector. The concrete corridors that led to bedrooms were festooned with 1950s posters of women in modest bathing costumes and obscure fifties French and other films. The metal doors to the bedrooms were redolent of Jailhouse Rock or noirish prison break movies. When the lift opened at each level, there were installations of fifties memorabilia. The breakfast room had a gigantic fruit machine next to an early 19th century stove, a parrot squawking, more posters, vases, cups and glasses, knicknacks on every conceivable surface.
What puzzled me was why we do this? There was once a brilliant documentary series on TV based on people's 'front rooms', the rooms that they felt represented them to the outside world. The places visitors would sit and edge from being strangers to acquaintances. The range of styles, decor, objects in these spaces raised intriguing sociological and psychological perspectives. Just as some birds adorn their nests with glittering or highly coloured found art (milk bottle tops, coloured string, feathers), humans have developed the same urge to a complex and subtle degree.
We are what we display.
L'Arche Hotel displayed an authorial mind that may have been searingly formed, traumatised, recontructed or reborn through some post-war, newly permissive Damascan episode. What led The Owner(s) to go to such ornate lengths to create this ambience? Was it merely the crudest form of 'theming' or something Baudrillard might have leapt upon...where identity is projected onto selected media, and mirroring then intensifies the growing fantastical identity. Whatever, we, the travellers, settled down inside the mind of this other, cocooned in tinted photographic images and the covert sexual mores of a past epoch.
We know ourselves only through how we are reflected in the eyes, words and behaviour of others towards us. We are a collection of fragments in a changing kaleidoscope. I have an idea now of the mind of The Owner of that hotel. Should I go on....
I own a small mountain house close to the Spanish border. It's a long drive from wherever you might want to land on French shores. I often go via Dieppe and choose a half way point to spend the night. Last week I had trouble finding a hotel because of French school holidays and was directed to Vierzon to stay at L'Arche. Normally I would prefer an old, small, family run business. This is what I found:
The hotel was in a new 'Place' and looked kitsch from the outside. Bizarre lighting and lots of Disneyesque concrete and glass. Inside was a decor that seemed to issue from the mind of an obsessive collector. The concrete corridors that led to bedrooms were festooned with 1950s posters of women in modest bathing costumes and obscure fifties French and other films. The metal doors to the bedrooms were redolent of Jailhouse Rock or noirish prison break movies. When the lift opened at each level, there were installations of fifties memorabilia. The breakfast room had a gigantic fruit machine next to an early 19th century stove, a parrot squawking, more posters, vases, cups and glasses, knicknacks on every conceivable surface.
What puzzled me was why we do this? There was once a brilliant documentary series on TV based on people's 'front rooms', the rooms that they felt represented them to the outside world. The places visitors would sit and edge from being strangers to acquaintances. The range of styles, decor, objects in these spaces raised intriguing sociological and psychological perspectives. Just as some birds adorn their nests with glittering or highly coloured found art (milk bottle tops, coloured string, feathers), humans have developed the same urge to a complex and subtle degree.
We are what we display.
L'Arche Hotel displayed an authorial mind that may have been searingly formed, traumatised, recontructed or reborn through some post-war, newly permissive Damascan episode. What led The Owner(s) to go to such ornate lengths to create this ambience? Was it merely the crudest form of 'theming' or something Baudrillard might have leapt upon...where identity is projected onto selected media, and mirroring then intensifies the growing fantastical identity. Whatever, we, the travellers, settled down inside the mind of this other, cocooned in tinted photographic images and the covert sexual mores of a past epoch.
We know ourselves only through how we are reflected in the eyes, words and behaviour of others towards us. We are a collection of fragments in a changing kaleidoscope. I have an idea now of the mind of The Owner of that hotel. Should I go on....
Labels: Living another's dream