Posts Tagged ‘freedom’
separating man from myth
December 22nd, 2008
separating man from myth, originally uploaded by s t e r n f a h r e r.
separating man from myth, originally uploaded by s t e r n f a h r e r.
“One man caught on a barbed wire fence
One man he resist
One man washed up on an empty beach
One man betrayed with a kiss
In the name of love
What more in the name of love”
- Pride, U2
–
sometimes I wonder. Separating the divinity from the man, Jesus Christ still remains an extraordinary figure in history. And I always stop at the crucifixion. Why did he allow himself to be in that position? Surely he could have done more good alive rather than dead? Was he liberating mankind or placing a terrible burden on it?
Did he believe in earnest that, if always responding to hate and suffering with absolute and unconditional love, that they would not crucify him, that they would come to their senses? Did he ask the father to forgive them, when he realized that, in their murderous frenzy, their hatred, they saw nothing of the love or suffering, only their false rage?
Did he forsee that the symbol of his crucifixion would become a burden of guilt on all to follow? To remember when you felt rage, that rage had already been felt. When you felt hate, that hate had already been felt and dealt with, with love and forgiveness?
But here we are today, still not free from that hate or suffering that led to the crucifixion. Repeating mistakes over and over. Was it all futile? Which way is forward?
–
Tags: divinity, freedom, guilt, ideas, Jesus Christ, life
Posted in Opinion, Photoblog, Politics/Ideas | Comments (5)
on the american dream
May 20th, 2008
A period in Paris, just after the war brought Bellow in touch with existentialism and post-war American writing is the subject of some ironic reflections in a famous essay Bellow published in 1963, “Some Thoughts on Recent American Fiction”. (The piece was written just as he was about to publish Herzog.) Here he reflects on the current appeal of new American fiction for European intellectuals; recalling the title of Wylie Sypher’s brilliant and then influential study of modernism, ‘Loss of the Self in Modern Literature and Art’, he observes that a literature of the lost and inauthentic self has become a staple of contemporary writing. In Europe, in the work of writers like Gide, Beckett, Sartre, and Camus, this arises from the crises of contemporary history, and the breakdown of Enlightenment thought, and has clear origins in philosophical theories of the human condition. ‘American writers, when they are moved by a similar spirit to reject and despise the Self,’ Bellow then adds ironically, ‘are seldom encumbered by such intellectual baggage, and this fact pleases their European contemporaries, who find in them a natural, that is, a brutal and violent acceptance of the new universal truth by minds free from intellectual preconceptions.’ In European writers he sees a nerveless collapse of humanism, a sacrifice to history or necessity or logic. In post-war American writing the violence of being, the absurdity of existence, the state of alienation are presented as plain and brute empiricism, a view of the way things just are.
- Malcolm Bradbury
A period in Paris, just after the war brought Bellow in touch with existentialism and post-war American writing is the subject of some ironic reflections in a famous essay Bellow published in 1963, “Some Thoughts on Recent American Fiction”. (The piece was written just as he was about to publish Herzog.) Here he reflects on the current appeal of new American fiction for European intellectuals; recalling the title of Wylie Sypher’s brilliant and then influential study of modernism, ‘Loss of the Self in Modern Literature and Art’, he observes that a literature of the lost and inauthentic self has become a staple of contemporary writing. In Europe, in the work of writers like Gide, Beckett, Sartre, and Camus, this arises from the crises of contemporary history, and the breakdown of Enlightenment thought, and has clear origins in philosophical theories of the human condition. ‘American writers, when they are moved by a similar spirit to reject and despise the Self,’ Bellow then adds ironically, ‘are seldom encumbered by such intellectual baggage, and this fact pleases their European contemporaries, who find in them a natural, that is, a brutal and violent acceptance of the new universal truth by minds free from intellectual preconceptions.’ In European writers he sees a nerveless collapse of humanism, a sacrifice to history or necessity or logic. In post-war American writing the violence of being, the absurdity of existence, the state of alienation are presented as plain and brute empiricism, a view of the way things just are.
- Malcolm Bradbury
I don’t know if it is post-war or if it actually started before the war.
Of the European philosophers, Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, Derrida and Baudrillard would be my greatest influences. Thoreau and Paine are the Americans I am reasonably familiar with.
Thoreau and Paine and Baudrillard have always seemed the “Free-est” of the lot — Thoreau and Paine by virtue of, as Bellow points out, having a natural (if brutal — not comfortable with the flavor of this word, unless understood in an exact intent) outlook, Baudrillard by virtue of having ripped apart (or rather, progressed to the next logical stage) of contemporary thought, with his precession of simulacra and the hyperreal.
Nietzsche tried to break free of the shackles, and succeeds somewhat, but he, like Sartre, I think, is encumbered by the baggage of prevailing politics — which for Sartre was his movement towards communism.
Camus is the odd one out here, somewhere between Thoreau and Derrida, I think sometimes, scraping against the outer arc of the idea, the event horizon of contemporary thought (I’d like to call this event horizon The Theater of the Absurd) without really breaking free of it.
Still, the tools these thinkers set into place have great value. One I haven’t mentioned, since I am still getting acquainted with his work, is of course Wittgenstein.
Anyways. I found this piece rather interesting, and, having now been immersed in these ideas for a while, I can’t help but thinking of Friedrich Holderlin’s words…
“We are in the period of darkness
between the Gods that have vanished
and the God that has not yet come,
between Matthew Arnold’s two worlds,
‘one dead, the other powerless to be born’”
Those thinkers are all gone, Baudrillard was the last. But their work remains incomplete.
Tags: america, Baudrillard, Camus, Derrida, existentialism, freedom, Holderlin, ideas, inhibitions, intellect, liberty, Nietzsche, Paine, philosophy, Sarte, slavery, Thoreau
Posted in Books, Opinion, Politics/Ideas | Comments (0)
beginnings and ends January 19th, 2008
hope is dead
some say
fifty years hopeless
a hundred years more without
for an identity
as true or false as any
untouched by the cosmopolitan merge
that civilizes many
torn by a rage against a motherland
hated beyond hate
torn by the yearning for a memory
that never was
fuelled by a grief one should never know
all for an identity that never was nor will be
for ever more
the World changed
as she slumbered under occupation
now she awakes to
find hope with no other
hope for herself is lost too
as also the will to reconcile true
what the future holds for this land
i do not know
where shall the memories of
hate and hurt go?
time is a healer, true
as is the end of it;
but which shall come first
for this burning paradise now?
will it be India or Pakistan
or an independent Kashmir?
who knows?
i fear none of them, for they will
not allow a peace to endure.
stranger things have happened, i know,
the Iron curtain did fall
but we know not yet
its complete use
which way forward?
which way back?
which will lead us on
the right track?
where pride is involved,
and territory and identity,
i fear we shall walk this country
hand in hand with misery
for a while longer before the tide turns
when will it turn?
one can never know
maybe at the end of history
or of all time
we will find out
when the time is right
let it not be
when time itself runs out
rather sooner
while we still light
this life.
- aditya
Tags: freedom, grief, jammu, kashmir, life, poetry
Posted in poetry | Comments (1)
