Life Lesson #16 [or #6A]

Curiosity > Contempt.

Salient as salient gets

This is the finest example of critical, cultural and linguistic wizardry I can identify. Reproduced here, in full, from the New Yorker website, and from its original home, Teju Cole's utter fucking genius.

WHAT IT IS 

Teju Cole

Is Ebola the isis of biological agents? Is Ebola the Boko Haram of aids? Is Ebola the al-Shabaab of dengue fever? Some say Ebola is the Milosevic of West Nile virus. Others say Ebola is the Ku Klux Klan of paper cuts. It’s obvious that Ebola is the MH370 of MH17. But at some point the question must be asked whether Ebola isn’t also the Narendra Modi of sleeping sickness. And I don’t mean to offend anyone’s sensitivities, but there’s more and more reason to believe that Ebola is the Sani Abacha of having some trouble peeing. At first there was, understandably, the suspicion that Ebola was the Hitler of apartheid, but now it has become abundantly clear that Ebola is actually the George W. Bush of being forced to listen to someone’s podcast. Folks, this thing is serious. The World Health Organization calls it the Putin of Stalin. In layperson’s terms, that’s like saying it’s the Stalin of U2. Now we are seeing the idea thrown around that it could be the Black Hand of the Black Death, not to mention the Red Peril of the Red Plague. If you don’t want to go that far, you have to at least admit that Ebola is the Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb of Stage IV brain cancer. At this point, it’s very possible that Ebola could become airborne and turn into the Tea Party of extreme climate events. Throughout the country of Africa, Ebola is the Abu Ghraib of think pieces. Look, I’m not the politically correct type, so I’m just going to put this out there: Ebola is the neo-Nazism of niggling knee injuries. The kind of threat it poses to the American way of life essentially makes it the North Korea of peanut allergies. I’m not going to lie to you, and I don’t care what color you are, you could be red, green, blue, purple, whatever; you need to understand that Ebola (the Obama of Osama, but don’t quote me) is literally the “Some of my best friends are black” of #NotAllMen. But the burning question no one has raised yet is whether Ebola is the Newsweek of halitosis. We’ll go to the phones in a moment and get your take on this. But first let me open the discussion up to our panel and ask whether Ebola is merely the Fox News of explosive incontinence, or whether the situation is much worse than that and Ebola is, in fact, the CNN of CNN.

Libertad y justicia

Imprescindible

No trates de vivir contra la vida.
No destruyas lo que el movimiento te ofrece para estar tranquilo.

Roberto Bolaño

Para que me entiendas, querido

“What I want to say, querido, is
hunger is not romantic to the hungry.
What I want to say is
fear is not thrilling if you’re the one afraid.
What I want to say is
poverty’s not quaint when it’s your house you can’t escape from.
Decay’s not beautiful to the decayed.”

- from Still Life with Potatoes, Pearls, Raw Meat, Rhinestones, Lard, and Horse Hooves by Sandra Cisneros

The Thing in Itself

"Today at work I was wiping shit down and I was just wistful as fuck. And I was like, damn, I really want to tell Devika about how fucking WISTFUL I am wiping off these goddamn counters. You know?" —Gwenmarie White

Photo: Ryan Primm. Art Direction: Gwenmarie White

Helium

I don't know how to explain what it is to walk around
silent, deserted Delhi streets after midnight
with four girls and four balloons.

Overheard, A Heated Exchange In an Imaginary

Howard Jacobson: “Remember how superior art is to belief.”

Czeslaw Milosz: “Art is not a sufficient substitute for the problem of leading a moral life.” 

Wantonness and Idolatry

“Leaving is not enough. You must stay gone. Train your heart like a dog. Change the locks even on the house he's never visited. You lucky, lucky girl. You have an apartment just your size. A bathtub full of tea. A heart the size of Arizona, but not nearly so arid. Don't wish away your cracked past, your crooked toes, your problems are papier-mâché puppets you made or bought because the vendor at the market was so compelling you just had to have them. You had to have him. And you did. And now you pull down the bridge between your houses, you make him call before he visits, you take a lover for granted, you take a lover who looks at you like maybe you are magic. Make the first bottle you consume in this place a relic. Place it on whatever altar you fashion with a knife and five cranberries. Don't lose too much weight. Stupid girls are always trying to disappear as revenge. And you are not stupid. You loved a man with more hands than a parade of beggars, and here you stand. Heart like a four-poster bed. Heart like a canvas. Heart leaking something so strong they can smell it in the street.”

* I found this on Facebook around the time of this post. It seems this is not a Frida quote. But the combination of this photo and these words had a huge impact on me, so here they are as a I first encountered them: together.

Sundays are for shaming.

A challenge so exact and exacting, I might have posed it to myself.

Anonymous June 24, 2012 9:17 AM

Globalness, noble? Ha. That's a clever way for rich liberal trust fund babies to pretend like their lives aren't lived out of pure selfishness. Insulting, delirious, ridiculous, but clever.

Devika June 24, 2012 12:00 PM

Having been born a "rich liberal trust fund baby," admittedly selfish, I suppose it's nice to distract myself with the possibility of being something else, something better. Perhaps that is a ridiculous, delirious prospect, and if it is insulting, I apologize. There is nothing clever about the pretense of being better, it is absolutely desperate. But even self-indulgent beasts like me might someday be of some use. And in the mean time, I hope we can be allowed to go on existing, even if nobody can stomach our idle and gratuitous internet musings.

d) All of the above

"If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day." - E.B. White

I've been circling ineloquently around this very thought for some years now, and after much unnecessary dialectical thinking and stress paralysis (do one, do the other, freak out and end up doing neither), I have, as always, settled on the most optimistic answer:

Do both.

In The Eye

The latest gem from Arundhati Roy:

"The first step towards re-imagining a world gone terribly wrong would be to stop the annihilation of those who have a different imagination -- an imagination that is outside of capitalism as well as communism. An imagination which has an altogether different understanding of what constitutes happiness and fulfillment. To gain this philosophical space, it is necessary to concede some physical space for the survival of those who may look like the keepers of our past, but who may really be the guides to our future. To do this, we have to ask our rulers: Can you leave the water in the rivers? The trees in the forest? Can you leave the bauxite in the mountain? If they say cannot, then perhaps they should stop preaching morality to the victims of their wars."

The essay which finds its conclusion in the paragraph above is stunning, upsetting, and absolutely essential. Put an hour aside and read every word.