nevermind the bricolage

The Great Stink+Pure Filth

I came across a remarkable essay by Stassa Edwards in Cabinet magazine about the 'Great Stink of 1858. It concerned the overflowing of the river Thames into the streets of London and the unleashing of a putrid stench stemming from the long-term practice of dumping waste of all kinds-animal, industrial and human, in the summer of 1858.

The essay explores the modern city and its relation to human waste, to dirt, to shit--there's a great line, "The Great Stink was, perhaps, an unwelcome metaphor for London's paradoxical modernity: it was the epicenter of a world power, its citizens could fundamentally change human knowledge, but all of this could be ended by a plumbing problem. and that is exactly what the great stink was: an epic plumbing catastrophe nearly two thousand years in the making."

Without stretching a metaphor too far, I am fairly convinced that after a couple of thousand years Christianity has a plumbing problem as well--it is over-flowing with shit--the detritus of centuries of dumping crap into the river of faith. Dogma, doctrines, ideas and metaphors that undermine the perception of what religion is, what it's functions are, how it works etc. Towards the end of the essay Edwards writes,

"Perhaps the Great Stink is an urban madeleine of sorts--not the sweet-smelling spongy cake that Proust envisioned, but a foul-smelling, deformed inversion of it. It invades the senses, creating memories of sensory revulsion. It reminds us of how quickly our smart city existences can devolve into primitive conditions."

One could argue that the rise of fundamentalisms in the early 21st century are indicative of the devolution of religion into a primitive, barbaric state.

Anyway, the essay prompted me to begin to address some ideas that I've been kicking around in my head for at least a couple of decades, just some niggling thoughts that I have wrestled with over the years related to what it means to have faith, to live a life impacted by religion, and a notion that the sterile, sanitized version of Christianity that most of us have experienced is an elaborate veneer masking a smell that needs to be addressed.

So I'm giving a series of talks called, Pure Filth, which will explore things like vulgarity, disgust, the unclean, the profane, the dirty and everything we tend to avoid but which are in fact, everyday realities and experiences for all of us in life--and maybe this will tease out another way of thinking about religion, or maybe it will just be a load of crap.

The very provocative image at the top is by Odd Nerdrum, entitled, Ecce Homo.

(Village Church 343 S. Church Lane, LA 90049 at 11:45am Sundays)

New Year

 

"New Year's eve is like every other night; there is no pause in the march of the universe, no breathless moment of silence among created things that the passage of another twelve months may be noted; and yet no man has quite the same thoughts this evening that come with the coming of darkness on other nights." Hamilton Wright Maibe

Like many of my friends I stayed home the New Years Eve, mainly because I was pretty jet-lagged from my trip home to England, but also because NYE never really gets me wanting to be out and about. It often feels like there is so much expectancy for 'something' to happen or be different--you can almost feel the wanting in the air. I have no axe to grind, I welcome the sentiments--letting go of the past, leaning into a new uncharted future, hoping that things will be better in our lives, but I can seldom bring myself to make it out into the streets. Time is a funny thing--we mark moments, grant them a significance, and underneath it all time marches on, oblivious to our posturings, unaware that we find in a particular moment, pause for thought and reflection.

My mum is losing her mind to dementia and I am acutely aware that a certain time is gone for her, and for me with regard to her--the clock still ticks--but with every movement of time she drifts further and further away from her sons, from herself, from the world--it's a sobering thing. And a part of me wishes to hurry up time, to bring things to their inevitable and ugly conclusion as quickly as possible--is that pity for her, or selfishness on my part? I don't know, probably a bit of both. 

What I realize, and believe me it is no great revelation, is that time pays no attention to us--it just keeps moving, reminding us, if we pay attention, of what a precious commodity it is.

I think that to honour the sentiment in Bing Crosby's song, we must give thanks for the time we've had, and the time yet to come, and live like we care.

et nox sicut dies illuminabitur: dark nights of the universe

I.
In the foundations of color, vision sees the
Universe; in the foundations of the Universe, it
sees man; in the foundations of man, it sees
vision.
The Earth, the World, the Universe have to do
with man: the Earth a little, the World a lot, the
Universe passionately. The Universe is the inner
passion for the Remote.
Man works the Earth, lives in the World, thinks
according to the Universe.
The Earth is man’s ground, the World his
neighbor, the Universe his secret.
The Earth is the strait through which passes the
light of the World; it is the tongue made of sand
and water upon which, standing, man strides
against the World.
The World is everything too vast and too narrow
for the Earth, and again too narrow for the
Universe.
Man gropes around the World and the World
floats in the Universe unable to touch its borders.

I've been reading a lot of the philosopher Simon Critchley lately and via him stumbled across Eugene Thacker and his marvellous book, In the Dust of this Planet: The Horrors of Philosophy, which, in my mind, is a must-read (not least for any fan of HBO's True Detective-it was a foundational text for the writer of the series).

Last year Thacker and some others hosted an event at Recess Arts in NYC-a four night exploration of laruelle's four-stanza poem, Du Noir Univers (dark nights of the universe). Here is one of the audio recordings of the sessions--really worth sitting down and giving the rest of them a listen.

 

 

from food porn to food deserts

Someone recommended that I see the film, One Hundred Foot Journey, a film set in an idyllic village in France that revolves around two restaurants--you guessed it-one hundred feet and a million miles from each other. It's a sweet film, nothing that profound, a light-hearted exploration of cultural difference, racism, bigotry, traditions and the benefit of learning from each other. An Indian family of cooks moves across the street from a Michelin-starred bastion of French culinary tradition-sparks fly and food is the medium.

As I watched the camera linger over eggs, the sheen of the yolk captured in a transcendental light and watched over and over as characters argued about, tasted, waxed lyrical about mushrooms, the five sauces of French cooking and the delight of Indian spices--I realized that I was watching a 90-minute food porn film! Now, I'm ok with food porn, although I must confess, much of it is lost on me, not sure if it is my lifelong fish-allergy or what, but when it comes to food it is probably the least adventurous part of my life-caution always prevails with me when it comes to food-I'm happy eating a very narrow set of foods, so food porn is watchable and enjoyable, but I am not that turned on by it and hardly a full-on particiapnt and not even much of a voyeur. I have a friend with whom I occasionally go to restaurants on her 'hot-list' and I love her reaction to the food she tastes as much, if not more than the reaction of my own taste buds.

But the film got me thinking about this love affair we are having with food. It's been building for years and in the past decade has poked above the surface of the culture and gone mainstream. it's not just the Food Channel, Cooking Channel, celebrity chef culture, there are magazines, there is a food-truck craze that shows little sign of abating, and so many other avenues down which our culture celebrates, no revels orgiastically, in food. One Hundred Foot Journey is at least the second film this summer that trades in food--Chef, Jon Favreau's homage to food truck eating opened the summer.

I have no issue at all with it, and in fact, I enjoy going to eat with people because it tends to mean that one is with people for whom you care and who care for you in return, and the occasion is usually a really enjoyable one, because food brings us together. I am just wondering what the current giddiness with food reflects about us and about culture at present.

There is no doubt in my mind that foodie-culture is connected to other shifts in our culture that are moving us more and more away from the modern world of utility and convenience. Food isn't just fuel, it is something to take delight in-it's about community, connecting with ourselves and others, connecting with the earth and with the material world in general. Cooking at home has become the new 'going-out,' building a list of go-to restaurants has become de-rigeur for many.

Slow-food movements, the increasing expansion of health food and organics into middle America (and middle-Britain for that matter), farmers markets, all these things point to a new relationship with food in our culture. And it is globally fuelled-food comes from anywhere and everywhere and the rules are broken almost everytime you go to a restaurant-in the 21st century, anything goes-old school, new school, in-between school, no school.

The other side of the equation is the counter to all this. We hear talk of food deserts, of large portions of our cities where there is little access to good food--processed and fast food remain the main diet of many poor and disadvantaged people, particulalry in the inner-city and un-gentrified parts of the urban landscape.

As always, a complicated picture, on the one hand you have a large section of the public enjoying food and exploring new eating and diet horizons in a manner that is mind-boggling, and on the other, people struggling to get access to affordable and healthy food. Food is always about access and economics-it's not that there isn't enough food to go around, it is that food, like everything exists within an economic horizon of profit and loss and it goes where the money is.

So what to make of it? Well, a couple of thoughts. Firstly, I think our new found devotion to food has something to do with a desire for a home, a sense of home anyway, that we have never had. I mean 'home' in the sense of a time in which everything felt ordered, organized and laid-out for us, in a way that we simply cannot experience in our digitally interconnected, globally shaped pluralized world. I think our time is longing, yearning even, for a rootedness and an anchoring--think about our retro-fascination for instance, and that food is a galvanizing place--all this cooking, eating, preparing, it reeks of home.

Secondly, I think it is about re-ordering the new world we find ourselves in by thinking about things that we haven't thought about for years. And food is central in that. Again, think about the 50s and 60s--processed food-tv dinners-fast-food culture-food on the run-colouring, additives, chemicals, dyes, living with little sense of where food came from, what it might represent beyond fuel for our working lives (work being another element of our world that we are reviewing). Now we are starting to think about food, enjoy it, savour it, prepare it, celebrate and take time with it.

As the modern worlds loses its grip on our lives, we are, as I just mentioned, taking the time to re-think many things and this is indicative of a huge cultural shift that we are all experiencing and we come toward the middle of the second decade of the 21st century we are beginning to re-frame our lives, our worlds, with new perspectives and ideas, letting go of ways that shaped us for much of the 20th century and finally finding our way into the 21st.

your life in weeks

"Weeks, months and days by and then, quite unexpectedly, when both have followed their destiny in their separate ways, the logic of chance brings them face." Dumas

I came across a thoughtful post on Wait But Why, breaking down a 90-year life into days, weeks and months. It is a little sobering to look at ones life broken down in to small pieces that fit so neatly onto a graph and then find yourself present position-depending upon ones age of course.

The exploitation of happiness

 

As much as I love Pharrell's Happy song, I am a bit troubled by the constant focus on 'finding happiness,' that I see everywhere my eye turns lately.  I realize that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is inscribed into the American psyche in a way that is beyond my Englishness to grasp, but this fixation on being happy, well, it's a bit over the top. Don't get me wrong, I like being happy, and, as someone who wrestles with depression, it's a rare and prized commodity for me, but it's precisley that idea that is capturing my attention of late.I am especially troubled by the linking of happiness to particular consumer products and actions. Happiness like many other things in life is constantly being commodified and linked to consumer capitalism in ways that undermine it's truer value.

I think happiness is rarer and a bit more elusive than we might imagine and not as readily attainable as we assume and I must admit that I am not sure happiness is as much of an entitlement as we would have ourselves believe it is.

Perhaps I should say that I think there are a couple of different kinds of happinesses to be experienced. One is the commodified version where happiness is linked to the fulfillment of one's desires, and often linked to some consumer practice or artifact. The other form of happiness is harder to come by, it involves the embrace of our full humanness, our brokenness, and if you like, a rejection of the 'pursuit of happiness' in favour of the pursuit of humanity, which in turn might just offer up a heavy dose of a different kind of happiness. I might also say that I find the commodification of the sacred as the most virulent form of happiness propaganda, the selling of religion as a pathway to happiess and fulfillment of desire is problematic for me, I'm not sure god exists to make us happy (not sure god exists, but another time for that one).

There is a great article on the visualculture blog about Coca-Cola, migrant workers and happiness-where of course Coca-Cola is the salvific bringer of happiness and blessing. It's a great examination of how advertising works, and how easily we can link a product to prized moral and ethical values. Definitely worth a look.

bowie: rock stars+people being dangerous

 

be ignorant: in the right way

I am working on a couple of book ideas, and have been sketching out some things that I have been living with for some time. One of them is a book on (de)centering practices. I spend a lot of time in relgious environs and there is always someone teaching a class on centering something, or talking about balance, or switching off, all valid ideas, but somehow they don't resonate with the way I approach the world and they are often drawn from traditions that removed themselves from the wider world and retreated into anther environ and shaped practices out of that. I don't live that way, I do not aspire to a monastic life or community, I don't seek refuge from the world, I want to grab it by the balls. I do have mechanisms for navigating it all, like everyone I have to stop every once in a while and think through how I am making my way through life, and make adjustments, take time out etc., but sometimes 'finding simplicity or balance' is not possible. In fact I am fairly sure that a balanced life is a modern myth, so I have been thinking for a couple of years now around other ways of handling life--managing noise, negotiating complexity, navigating randomness and uncertainty, stuff like that.

Alongside that I have been thinking a lot about the 'god trajectory'; the death/post/after god conversation; the radical a/theism theology discourse; and particualrly of the post-mystical.

In my theology and culture class we just finshed a couple of weeks talking about human physicality, sexuality, identity and the theological intersections, all in an effort to join the dots in new configurations that better address the world we inhabit. We began that journey with some comments from Giorgio Agamben from his book Nudities, where he states that 'nudity in our culture has a theological signature', essentially arguing that the relationship to nakedness we hold in Western culture is rooted in a Judeo-christian informed perspective that finds its way back to Genesis, the book of beginnings, to the fall, t0 shame etc. But as I re-read the book it was the book's closing paragraphs that hit me on an entirely other level, related more to my present thinking around the above-mentioned topics.

"The ways in which we do not know things are just as important (and perhaps more important) as the ways in which we know them...it is possible, in fact, that the way in which we are able to be ignorant is precisley what defines the rank of what we are able to know and that the articulation of a zone of non-knowledge is the condition and at the same time the touchstone of all our knowledge...The act of living is, in this sense, the capacity to keep ourselves in harmonious relationship with that which escapes us."

There is a clue in here related to some of the ideas I am working with. Rather than binary oppostions silence/noise, simplicity/complexity, there is another way of thinking about things, much more complimentary and interrelated than oppositional. Agamben is not talking about not-knowing as a defective thing, as 'clumsiness' as he puts it, but a different kind of relationship between both what is known and what is unknown. To me this connects with Vattimo's concept of weak thinking and Caputo's weak theology. I'll come back to that in another post.

 

 

hieroglyphs of love

 

"I believe that we are put here in human form to decipher the hieroglyphs of love and suffering. And, there is no degree of love or intensity of feeling that does not bring with it the possibility of a crippling hurt. But, it is a duty to take that risk and love without reserve or defense." Allan Ginsberg

Disorders of Arousal

I get migraines. They come in cycles, and I can go for a failry long spell without any, but once they start up it seems to last for a few months. Sometimes I can function as bit and sometimes like this week I am completely incapacitated and driven to the edge of madness by a relentless pain and strange set of experiences that verge on the hallucinogenic.

I've worked out that they are often stress-related. Well, they are actually the product of the internalization process that goes on after I have been in tense situations and have had to defend myself or have been spoken to in ways that hurt much more than I let on. I do a really good job of beating myself up and don't need much outside help and occasionally, and usually after a sustained period of feeling a little embattled, I have an internal collapse and then...

Oliver Sacks has a remarkable book on the subject. To read the book is to see oneself in glorious technicolour, page after page of stuff that is so on the money. He writes of 'an abnormal firing of neurons in brainstem nuclei on the basis of some intrinsic excess of sensitivity' and terms the essential features surrounding the myriad symptoms of migraine as disorders of arousal.

Stress-reduction, which is an oft-addressed part of migraine conversations, is a challenging thing. I do yoga which can be helpful, and I try to be mindful and pay attention when things start to get to me, but somehow I can never quite pinpoint the tipping point.

Ultimately for me, it comes down to finding ways not to take things so hard internally, and I think this also probably means facing up to the fact that I have put myself, or at least found myself, in environments where most of the people that I work with are conservationists and status quo-minded and my move is always forward, which almost always destined to lead to some kind of tension eventually. Not that I think one can live life without frustration or tension but I have some serious thinking to do about where I plant myself in life and the kinds of environments I work in.

Of course, none of that matters once the bloody thing has kicked in, its just 24-48 hours of fucking torture-strange body sensations, sleeplessness, hallucinations, vomiting, crying--a roller-coaster ride to nowhere.

I'm on the other side of it today, I feel like I've been hit by a truck but I'm relieved that it is over, and can enjoy the sunshine.