Tuesday, January 18, 2005

Renee M. Zepeda
WRI 723: East Meets West
January 16, 2005

10 Terms Related to Post-Colonial Conditions

New—What is striking about the ‘new’ internationalism is that the move from the specific to the general, from material to metaphoric, is not a smooth passage of transition and transcendence (Locations of Culture, 5). Certain things make me new again: fasting, rosemary baths, beeswax candles, art, oceans, pools, saunas, water, sleep. New is untainted, unadulterated, Museum-quality.

Displacement—shuffling of political elements in order to create a sense of unhomeness. As there is strength in numbers, the system continually tries to pull individuals apart.

Citizenship—As Anne Waldman said In the Room of Never Grieve, “I am an American. I vote. I pay the tax.” Jhumpa Lahiri (Interpreter of Maladies):

“Mr. Sen says that once I receive my license, everything will improve. What do you think, Eliot? Will things improve?
“You could go places,” Eliot suggested. “You could go anywhere.”
“Could I drive all the way to Calcutta? How long would that take, Eliot? Ten thousand miles, at fifty miles per hour?”

Time—Simone Weil (Gravity and Grace):

You could not be born at a better period than the present,
when we have lost everything.

“I don’t know why we have lost everything,” I said to Anne Carson. “It may be an existentialist comment,” she said. “Or Simone Weil means that there is nothing but the present.”

Time, as it flows, wears down and destroys that which is temporal. [The way water wears away the roughness of porous stone, making it smooth, polished.] Accordingly, there is more of eternity in the past than in the present. The value of history properly understood is analogous to that of remembrance in Proust. (Gravity and Grace, 229)

Reminiscent of Rilke, who said that one can always write about childhood.
And what did Walter Benjamin say? Bhabha (Locations of Culture, 4): Unlike the hand of history that tells the beads of sequential time like a rosary, seeking to establish serial, causal connections, we are now confronted with what Walter Benjamin describes as the blasting of a monadic moment from the homogenous course of history, ‘establishing the conception of the present as the “time of the now”’… A surge in the music of Beethoven as I pick up Luce Irigary’s The Way of Love.

Boundaries—“There are boundaries and we cross them always at some peril.”—Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Boundaries I have crossed on a macro-scale: travel to Munich, Berlin, Stuttgart, Strasbourg, Paris, the Dordogne Region, Barcelona, Prague, Rome, Milan, Heathrow Airport, Amsterdam, Stratford, Cozumel, California. Boundaries I have crossed on a micro-scale: human relationships, homes, gardens, bedrooms, offices, churches, synagogues, temples.

Weil: In order that a conception of the human condition should remain constant despite the manifold experiences and vicissitudes of fortune—there must by an inspiration from on high. Thus...

A postcard from the Detroit Institute of Art of Fra Angelico’s Angel
Silk screens of Green Tara
Depiction of a Unicorn from the Cloisters Museum
Giotto’s frescos
Cave paintings in Lascaux
La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona
Macchu Picchu

Gender--I recently had dinner with Jonathan who told me it would be better if I were taller and smiled less. A condition of being the ever-critiqued young woman, or just a woman, I wonder.

Personhood—-Michael Ondaatje (Anil’s Ghost):

We are full of anarchy. In Sri Lanka one is surrounded by family order, most
people know every meeting you have…there is nothing anonymous. But if I meet
a Sri Lankan elsewhere in the world and we have a free afternoon, it doesn’t
necessarily happen, but each of us knows all hell could break loose. What is
that quality in us? That makes us cause our own rain and smoke?

Debt—The modern form of slavery.

Love—“What do you think marriage is about?” My father asked me two summers ago. “Love,” I answered. “Marriage isn’t about love. It’s about property,” he said.
Weil: We should have with each person the relationship of one conception of the universe to another conception of the universe, and not to a part of the universe.

Memory—Lyn Hejinian’s Writing as an aid to memory. Memories of Hawaii. Pineapple fields. White beaches and saltsultry Pacific. Memories of family. Childhood. Cristina Moisa, the Romanian-American philosopher, recently asked me if there are gardens in Colorado. She imagined beautiful, fragile-skinned pale moon-flowers growing on the high desert plateaus, coldly, at night, beneath the moon. I told her where I live there is no garden, but there are, seemingly, many Kindergartens around, where grow not moon-flowers, but children. Maybe I live in such a place now, growing myself, repairing myself, allowing myself to be clipped or weeded around, as if I were a Champion rosebush that relocated in order to find better growing conditions. My roses seem to love the sun and powerful mountains, plenty of water, and chocolate.

1 Comments:

Blogger Prognostika said...

What a great post is this Στοίχημα! Really nice!

11:58 PM  

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