Suspicious to the Core (six / 2)

Unshakably Resilient :The Resistance-Reverence Nexus

Let’s Bee/have : Dare 2 Distinguish

An exquisite and utterly provocative commentary on some of the issues regarding language, public discourse, the public-private scale demarcating individual and communal aspects of human beings, and the meaning and the role of norms and conventions in culture can be found in Ian McEwan’s novel The Children Act (2014). While McEwan’s oeuvre, in a very broad sense, may be perceived in the light of the wordsworthian tradition, as articulated in the Preface to the second edition of William Wordsworth’s and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (1800), even the most loyal readership mobilize their suspicion apparatus to question the narrative technique and seek justification in the message delivered within the how-what nexus.

The manner in which the storyline raises awareness of the formal aspects of the narration is to a high extent an invitation to enter a quietly rebellious conversation with that what is happening in this seemingly hyper-conventional, at times puzzlingly pacifying, story. That Ian McEwan’s style is certainly anchored in the capacity to juggle, combine, and put in a challenging dialogue soothing wording heavily relying on traditional prose with  nuggets of dissident thought spiking the lulling flow with a tiny dosage of darker shades woven in the narrative tissue is more than obvious. That it features incredible potential to galvanize a critical approach to the themes of relevance is what makes that signature part of the communication currency highlighting crucial aspects of the exchange within the community of human beings worthy of the challenge.

And yet, what seems to be specific about the way this signature technique is deployed in the novel in question is the degree to which it saturates the narrative. The literary convention weaves the narrative yarns solidly to the point where one wonders whether such a device becomes part of the message that addresses the issue of great importance. It is related to the question of the norm, abiding by it, questioning it, subverting it—in the service of communication between and among selfless, yet re-individualized, fellow humans. Namely, in an ultimate sense, it is the question of the way gentleness toward, respect, and care for another human being can be integrated into the social vocabulary conditioned and shaped by conventions and norms. Simultaneously, it looks at the ways cultural realities display an excess in insisting on formalities, thereby signaling certain deviations in the domain of the politeness-humaneness relationship.

The character of Fiona Maye, London’s High Court judge, epitomizes the burden of “being civilized.” To say that she is dedicated to her profession is neither an understatement nor an overstatement. It is an ill-articulated issue. Her “professionalism” hinders her functioning on the private plane. In the world where brazen survivalist impositions might blind one to the deviations of the patterns that can make human life much more humane, much needed resistance instigates suspension of belief, thus enabling thinking in the key that subverts threats of coercion, threats to the mutually conditioning relationship between discourse and cultural realities.

Fiona is confronted with her husband’s love affair with a much younger woman. He cannot resist the call to reanimate the passion fueling the whole being. She cannot accept being abandoned, betrayed. Having had him leave the apartment and the lock on the apartment’s door  changed, she undergoes an ordeal of self-doubt, social anxiety—interestingly, primarily considering the ways to avoid being pitied—and resurfacing through the case in which she “saves” a boy from a detrimental influence of his and his parents’ religious creed. Jehovah’s Witnesses do not believe in transfusion. According to their doctrine, to allow somebody else’s blood in one’s body is sinful. The boy was going to turn eighteen in three months. Regardless, Fiona decides to make a legally questionable decision in order to enable the law to ensure the boy’s treatment. She declares transfusion legally justifiable. Adam Henry is not just cured, but he is also relieved of the clutches of the staggeringly restricting religious circle that he knew.

The judge experiences an extraordinarily rejuvenating jolt through the communication with Adam, through poetic and musical exchange, and a light encounter with his body at the moment when their cheeks briefly touch, when a soft, unpretentious, unimposing, and nonpromiscuous kiss marks their separation. Despite the allure of those lyrical moments, she refrains from challenging either herself or Adam beyond the limits of the social norm. Meanwhile, she resumes her matrimonial everyday with her husband Jack in an enchanting insipidness of the gated community in which they live.

Here arises the crux of the narrative. It is not her embracing social norms that adds up to the troubling dynamics of the character of Fiona. Rather, it is the way in which politeness and formalities assume a radical dimension that renders them questionable, to say the very least. The extremism in which manners are used as a defensive tool--sheer survivalist means--indicate not only its alleged capacity to ensure inviolability, but McEwan makes it clear how deceptive that defense may be. More precisely, the rigidity of “politeness” turns out to be a somewhat distorted version of the kindness that nourishing, protective control normally generates. In its radical version, it is a corruption of the meaning typically ascribed to the word. Instead of shielding, it isolates. Instead of protecting, it desensitizes. By supposedly preventing vulnerability, it, actually, inhibits openness to another human being. It constricts engagement in human communication. It is the distance that exceeds the vibrant threshold. Under the disguise of safety, it hinders bonding. It is maintained by virtue of anxiety, sense of threat, being endangered by other humans. It spurs the mentality of rivalry and hostility. It encourages a sterile socioscape—barren coldness in the midst of global warming. It is not polite.

How McEwan’s narrative technique conveys the message of that conundrum is a matter of peculiar, sophisticated sensitivity to literary subtleties and moral issues. There is a parallel between the unfolding of Fiona’s bleakly impregnable world that provides the enchantment of aloofness at the expense of everything else on the one hand and, on the other, the storyline that progresses steadily, and yet, so “politely” that it provokes suspicion. Until the clue is provided within an unlikely conversation between the couple at the restaurant. Upon Fiona’s return to London, having spent a fortnight on a business trip, they go out for dinner. Jack shares insights he was exposed to in a geology lecture:

A hundred million years into the future, when much of the oceans had sunk into the earth’s mantle and there wasn’t enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to sustain plants and the surface of the world was lifeless rocky desert, what evidence would a visiting extraterrestrial geologist find of our civilization? A few feet below the ground a thick line in the rock would mark us off from all that had gone before. Condensed into that six-inch sooty layer would be our cities, vehicles, roads, bridges, weapons. (The Children Act 184)

Jack is particularly keen on deciphering the instances within the lecture that mark the point he allegedly ascribes to the lecturer’s observations concerning “the beginning of a mass extinction in which life’s variety had started to narrow” (184).  He is insistent on detailing that minute layer that testifies to our civilization:

Also, all sorts of chemical compounds not found in the previous geological record. Concrete and brick would weather down as easily as limestone. Our finest steel would become a crumbling ferrous stain. A more detailed microscopic examination might reveal a preponderance of pollen from the monotonous grasslands we had made to feed a giant population of livestock. (184)

Jack’s tirade unsettles his wife. She goes to the ladies’ room to regain her composure, “where she stood in front of the mirror, eyes closed, comb in hand in case someone came in, and drew a few slow deep breaths” (185). The scene reflects the manner in which their relationship is being re-established: ”The thaw was neither quick nor linear. At first it was a relief, not to be self-consciously avoiding each other around the flat, not to be coldly competing in politeness in that stifling way they had” (185).

Only with the introduction of different sound do the harsh edges of their worlds soften. Atypically reduced preparations for the annual concert find Fiona strangely at ease. The time she and her co-performer, Mark Berner, were supposed to spend practicing was taken up by his extended confession about a particular case, apparently constituting his swan song, as long as the world of law is concerned. His tenor was stubbornly submerged in that lengthy analysis of legal sanctions applied to some of the participants in the case of a youth violence drenched clash. Fiona is anxious to lower her fingers on the keys. And, yet Mark shares on. Eventually, without either asking for a permission or waiting for an approval, the piano spills notes into the cold of London night having been touched by the hands of the pianist. Mark’s tenor joins her somewhat inspired, somewhat dutiful play.

One night in December, when London was zoning through a hazy corridor connecting the dissipating day and the onset of the evening, Fiona busied herself after work with the preparations for the performance she was going to give in a couple of hours. Not only does her utmost elegant attire color the evening with the shade of solemn exultation, but the room filled with Jack’s presence exudes a magical composite of warmth and smell rising from the fireplace in a silent conversation with a seductive coating leaking from their rarely used stereo. It is Keith Jarrett. Facing You drifts across the room. Sound that melts even the most frozen of thoughts. The wizardry of playing the written notes enriched with the sound created in the interstices of the record on the sheet.

Why does the complexity of jazz inspire nostalgic invocation of the rudimentary patterns of the blues and the beauty of their seemingly predictable combinations? Why is such nostalgic musical thinking evocative of even less demanding paradigms, blatantly sweet easiness of the three chord axiom? How does the sound snake seamlessly through that meandering borderless empire of genres within which each, paradoxically, remains intact, sustains integrity? One would like to know.

Why does the sound reanimate the memories of the early days of their relationship when passion occupied each cell of their bodies, each instant of their existence? It was the time when Jack exposed her to the magic of jazz and when alongside her discovery of the likes of Thelonious Monk, Fiona finds out what it means to be entirely immersed in an ecstatic buzz. The powerful sensation that perhaps never leaves one.

The quandary may acquire a somewhat clearer form once filtered and sifted through the lens of Terry Eagleton’s idiom, especially the instance looking at the nature of jazz jamming and the role of communication within the band:

[T]o a large extent each member is free to express herself as she likes. But she does so with a receptive sensitivity to the self-expressive performances of the other musicians. The complex harmony they fashion comes not from playing from a collective score, but from the free musical expression of each member acting as the basis for the free expression of the others. As each player grows more musically eloquent, the others draw inspiration from this and are spurred to greater heights. There is no conflict here between freedom and the ‘good of the whole’, yet the image is the reverse of totalitarian. Though each performer contributes to ‘the greater good of the whole’, she does so not by some grim-lipped self-sacrifice but simply by expressing herself. There is self-realization, but only through the loss of self in the music as a whole. (The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction 100)

So, is the parallel between the two discoveries an accurate trope depicting Fiona’s experience? Jack’s memories bear witness to her confined perception and consternated approach to the riches playfulness offers:

He played her Thelonious Monk’s “Round Midnight” and bought her the sheet music. It wasn’t difficult to play. But her version, smooth and unaccented, sounded like an unremarkable piece by Debussy. That was fine, Jack told her. The great jazz masters adored and learned from him. She listened again, she persisted, she played what was in front of her, but she could not play jazz. No pulse, no instinct for syncopation, no freedom, no fingers numbly obedient to the time signature and notes as written. That was why she was studying law, she told her lover. Respect for rules. (200)

 Fiona becomes susceptible to the enchantment of that winter eve filled with music, flame-and-ember backdrop, Jack treating her with champagne, cheese, olives, kiss, and touch. They had to refrain from proceeding with indulging in the exhilaration with the re-enliven bodies. Fiona was to perform in a couple of hours.

Their playing was met by multiple--slightly unconventional for a classical music gig—standing ovations. As she walks from the stage, she meets a woman who tells her something, after which she walks home through the rain. Her hair is still wet when Jack comes home. Half concerned with helping her dry herself, half inquiring about the reason why she left, Jack is attentive. Unexpectedly, the boy who became a hero of her career and penetrated her emotional world in an utterly peculiar way, re-enters it.

Only now, he is dead. That’s the information the woman relayed. That’s the information she now shares with Jack. She shamelessly admits kissing him. Somewhat less assertively, she acknowledges that she never responded to his letters. She neglected the symbolic that might have been there. But only might. Was he determined to relapse, so to speak? Was he outlining his intent to go back to his family, religion, to embrace it, and (mis)use it as an excuse to refuse treatment once leukemia plagues his body again?

Those might be some of the thoughts occupying Fiona’s and Jack’s communication channel. As the story is sagging into the nocturnal sphere saturating the words being exchanged, the theme of the death of the boy morphs with the metaphoric realm, as the two are examining each other’s face, lying next to one another, and their marriage resumes by virtue of the soft rhythm of falling darkness.

Thus, once again one wonders where within Ian McEwan’s novel the equivalents of the descriptions  of the sediment-record can be found. Is it being too polite? Where is the voice that speaks in the key of the sound rebellion reinstating the currency in the communication channel: homo homini homo est?

Is Ian McEwan being overprotective? If so, is such an attitude patronizing? Could it be a commentary on the nanny state McEwan bears witness to? May it be related to the awareness of the society that is acquiring characteristics of overregulated anomie?

If the narrative parallels, reflects, and incorporates aspects of the worrisome thematic, one can’t but wonder if it is a high cost compromise? Does it sacrifice (or, scapegoat, for that matter) the adventure provided by an edgier, subversive, defiant vernacular? Perhaps. One would be misled to believe. Were it not for the components of the novel tangential to the plot, discreetly  embroidering the narrative tapestry, anchoring the belief in the potential of rebellion through subtonic hi-fi solidarity of selfless, yet re-individualized, fellow humans. The components of the novel where darkness closes in, where reigns rain sovereign. Anchoring the potential of the remix.

Suspicious to the Core (6 / one)

Unshakably Resilient : The Resistance-Reverence Nexus

Orgies of (self)enslaving Despotism : NOise

“The stupidest person in the world is an all-round genius compared to the cleverest computer. How we learn to imagine and express things is a riddle with premises impossible to express and a solution impossible to imagine.” Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions

we are not robozombies!

Despite certain relativist factions of postmodernist discourse aiming to redescribe moral vocabulary, one can’t but share the passion imbued in the defense of fathers in Plato’s The Republic (2015).[1] He points out instances in corrupt socioscape featuring unscrupulous patricide either driven by a bewildering rule of more than one in aristocracy--as opposed to the rule of one in kingdom--abysmal desire for profit, or insatiable hunger for social status, as is the case in oligarchy, or sheer nonsense and absurdity inherent in disorderliness (albeit not lawlessness) and chaos grotesquely mispresented under the disguise of liberty, as it occurs to a different extent in democracy and in a radical form in tyranny. One couldn’t agree more with resistance to patricide, as Plato’s narrative “unmasks” bestiality of travesty:”That perfect and unseasonable liberty has been exchanged for a new dress, the most cruel and the most bitter slavery under slaves” (The Republic 435).

Fortunately, however, power on steroids--so to speak--is not power. Plato:”the tyrannic nature has never a taste of true freedom and friendship” (The Republic 442). Power addicts, enchanted by a delusional idea of human omnipotence, tend to establish their supremacy through recklessly coercive mechanisms of control. Unlikely rulers sustain an illusion of power by perpetuating dominance-subordination based social relations. Alas, those pursuers of social and economic heights are but a failure of mimicry of sovereignity. Bereft of authority, they are but miserable slaves agonizing in an attempt to block an insight into despotism under the disguise of unleashed liberty. Despots enslaved in the dungeon of their own tyranny. Noise blind to (self)dissolvement.

Now, this rejection of patricide finds numberless instances of its deviant version. In other words, it is the very attempt to replicate the role of the father figure in social terms and its cultural significance that engenders and is generated by insistence on defense of seeming authority, while, in fact, sustaining tyranny. It should be noted that the remarks made here in relation to the symbolic of the father by no means imply inclinations toward patriarchal hierarchy based on inequity and inhumaneness. Nor should one be misled to equate resistance to patricide with affinity for ossification.

One can never be avant-garde enough to believe in unscrupulous, rigid, mindless, radical breakaway from tradition. At the same time, no epoch is worthy of regressive, reactionary nostalgia entailing a perpetuation of social ills. It is the capacity to nourish the hybrid attitude combining resistance and reverence that ensures sound social and creative / critical responses in the key of the communication between experimentation and tradition, between change and preservation.

Discourse and cultural realities are in a mutually conditioning relationship. In the modern world, one of its multiple manifestations is a digitized fantasy of omnipotence featured in an image of endurance coupled with a deceitful idea of eternity, as could be inferred from Kenneth Goldsmith’s observation in Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (2011):”the point that these ‘ephemeral’ wisps of data might not be so ephemeral as we think” (182). Virtual spaces reconfirm the thought of Eagleton’s:”Immortality and immorality are closely allied” (After Theory 211).

And yet, passion for learning keeps one’s awareness of the lesson Joyce’s novel Ulysses teaches. The vibrancy of the message concerning mutual recognition and bonding within the parental-filial fellowship resonates: those virtual falsehoods are not fathers. Neither demonizing nor glorifying technology per se, human beings, out of solidarity, engage in helping the internet hack its own integrity, break the spell of a corporate nightmare, recuperate and reinstate the postulate of playfulness—again.

Thus, according to Goldsmith’s reflection, appearance of certain data on the internet seems to challenge the notion of the ephemeral. And yet, mere sustenance of those materials stored in some virtual galaxies should by no means be erratically equated with endurance. Or, persistence for that matter. Let alone perseverance. By contrast, sifting and filtering--parsing, as Goldsmith notes--through the lens of critical thinking reveals the distraction,  reconsolidates critical distance, and reconfirms the potential for discerning and sustaining the distinction between randomly etherized sequences in a digital universe and cultivated legacy maintained through the intersection of the time axes: recuperating the past, reimagining the future, and resurrecting the present.

Pluralist playfulness in the critical / creative realm calls for a distinction between that source of inspiration and possibilities of communication on the one hand and, on the other, aesthetic anomie, blatant reductionism, unconstrained relativism, and/or indiscriminate proliferation of vocabularies, uncritical, orgiastic immersion in a mutually conditioning relationship between discourse and cultural realities, unselective investment in democratization of discourse, oversimplification of communication, unbridled hypostatization of concepts – as a means and/or result of the mentality of gladiatorship.

In a world that values quantity, celebrity status is ensured via sensationalist overload, paradoxically ending up in warholian fifteen minute chunks of fame. That brevity is but a chimera of contrast to the dictum of quantity. It may be part of the data supposedly eluding their own mundane nature, yet, clearly, the perception of those chunks of ones & zeros as a subversion of transience displays blurry signification ascribed to the symbolic aspect of the notion of the ephemeral – and/or its opposite, for that matter. This is only to reinstate the relevance of literary subtleties and to reconstitute the capacity to re-sensitize to the power of metaphor. To approach critically the allure of virtual eternity/immortality is to resist a deceitful idea of human unrestrained power – a fantasy of omnipotence. Language, by virtue of its limited power, helps humans resume and enhance the awareness of their own limits and the bliss of poise.

Tales of Opacity, Masks of Travesty / Multivalent Control

“Are we not men?”

Devo, “Jocko Homo,” Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! (1978)

Strangely, those etherized spaces, instead of resilience, oftentimes spur reflexivity leaning toward replicating. Or, attempts thereof. Instead of playfulness vouched for by the utopian vision of that empire of unhindered exchange, the virtual offers an entrapping reflective/reflexive model. Namely, a friendly approach to the way the message is delivered to those who happen to find themselves in an encounter with the contents available within the digital sphere--online and offline alike--has been transformed into a deviant version of that initial soft spoken lingo. As the instructions have become directions, suggestions directives, clues readily available (quasi)solutions, hints cognition inhibitors, rather than instigators of ideas, those who come across and/or use them might be misled to believe that they reflect the modus operandi of the human mind. And yet, if they dare allow themselves to establish immunity to such a repulsive offense, humans are likely to acknowledge the complexity and subtlety pertinent to our intellectual-imaginative apparatus resisting abhorrently mechanistic reductionism.

we are not robozombies!

The virtual is a vast empire. Information generated through those indefatigable combinations of ones & zeros spreads as fast as and as widely as it gets. So does the syntax to which its ingredients adhere. Proportionately to the time spent in the company of digital devices, there is an increase in attuning to the tone of the vernacular. To cultivate the faculty of listening and to demonstrate the capacity to hear the interlocutor is pivotal to the remix. So is the potential for critical thinking safeguarding and sharpening sensitivity to nuances, ensuring the ability to discern and sustain distinctions: perceptiveness vs. prescriptiveness, for example.

Kenneth Goldsmith:”When we look closely at what types of words platter across our environment, we’ll find they are mostly prescriptive and directive: either the language of authority (parking signs, license plates) or the language of consumerism (advertising, product, display)” (Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age 42). Language of authority? Hack the abstraction! McKenzie Wark: ”Capitalism or barbarism, those are the choices. This is an epoch governed by this blackmail: either more and more of the same, or the end times. Or so they say. We don’t buy it” (The Beach beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International 1).

Another absurdity arises from the inclination toward a pragmatic approach to communicational tools, affinities for unstylized verbalization: the more supposedly demystified the mode of communication, the more coded its articulation. Consumerist streak governing means of communication dictates a bias toward materiality. Absurdly, that decoupling from stylization is frequently categorized as aestheticization. One can’t but notice that verbal content void of implicit layers is not necessarily an epitome of clarity. Nor is it emblematic of simplicity. To simplify it does not make it simple. Just as stylizing it does not entail integrating into it critical distance. Kenneth Goldsmith:”By drawing our attention not to what they are saying but how they are saying it, Language Removal Services inverts our normative relationship to language, prioritizing materiality and opacity over transparency and communication” (Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age 49). This, again, inspires thinking in the vein of Eagleton’s reasoning: “The norm now is money; but since money has no principles or identity of its own, it is no kind of norm at all” (After Theory 16-17).

Neither materialist nor technological--or any other kind of--determinism is the basis on which this narrative is woven, however. Thus, neither ignoring nor hyperinvesting in the impact of the digital realm on the communication within the community of human beings, one is prone to note  instances of insensitivity to resilience and playfulness. Bizarrely enough, they can be found in artistic circles, just as they appear in other areas. According to Kenneth Goldsmith, both John Cage and Sol LeWitt bore witness to a tremendously afflicting effect of such blindness to creative processes:”There are many stories of John Cage storming out of rehearsal sessions in anger after contract musicians of orchestras refused to take his music seriously. Cage, like LeWitt, gave musicians a lot of leeway with his scores, providing only vague instructions, but was often frustrated by the results” (Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age 135).

Between stylization and beautification, purity and bluntness--masks of travesty haunt babylonian empires. Between ease and oversimplification, silence and mutism—multivalent control. Robbing from individuals the capacity to discern and sustain the distinction between reagent and reactant, they draw from the legacy of oppressive social mechanisms. They are persistent in trying to dissolve interconnectivity. And yet, fervor and resilience, resistance and reverence generate vibrant social responses: subtonic hi-fi solidarity of selfless, yet re-individualized, fellow humans united in enduring hindrances to the persistent and patient creation of a free culture based on trust and love.

---

[1] Plato, The Republic. 380 BC. Great Dialogues of Plato. Trans. W.H.D. Rouse. New York: Signet Classics, Penguin Group, 2015. Print.

Suspicious to the Core (5 / three)

Lear learns what he needs (2.4.264). He also learns to cast aside what he does not need. His temperance matures as the tempest of “filial ingratitude” (3.4.14), once ravaging his heart, recedes. So long as Gonerill knows what she does (2.4.228), as Regan points out, there is potential for recuperation. Lear knows it. Lear learns. That knowledge seems to be reaching him in the ways as mysterious as the flow that redeems Gloucester’s unrequited heed. Edgar’s words of encouragement and comfort, “Bear free and patient thoughts” (4.5.80), are constitutive of the anchor that provides stability and solidity of the attitude, as it is being established. Lear learns:”No, I will be the pattern of all patience. / I will say nothing” (3.2.35-36).

Strangely, as Kent informs, “[t] hings that love night” (3.2.40) withdraw before the “darkness” of the night from which Lear speaks. The power of the night like that exudes an air of animosity toward the thickness of obscurity. It creates a chemistry of negative valences. It procures Lear the basis for the oppositional attitude. It provides him with knowledge -- the knowledge of resistance, that weird source of vigor. The power of “NO.”

Lear learns the virtue of noble rebellion, so Kent’s temptations, “Sir, where is the patience now / That you so oft have boasted to retain?” (3.6.15-16), can be refuted and, accordingly, discarded. Again, what is clouded by the harshness of Lear’s verbal spitting surfaces through the kind, appeasing words of Edgar’s:”My tears begin to take his part so much / They mar my counterfeiting” (3.6.18-19). That falling mask, as it were, is the adhesive tissue of the soothing power of filial gentleness. It epitomizes the credibility of Lear’s attitude reflected in fiercely challenging hard-heartedness (3.6.34-35).

It re-shifts erratically channeled passion. It reconfirms the vibrancy of resistance. It reconstitutes the sound response to bewilderment and oppression: the cleansing power of the capacity to discern and sustain distinctions. It reanimates the basis for the reasoning that highlights the difference between the nourishing restraint and abusive, manipulative, oppressive distortions of that bliss.

/

So spoke Lear when he could not cry. Similarly, the cornucopia of speech ignited by Bloom’s magical act in the encounter with the faucet--revamping the waters of words flowing from the earlier chapters such as “Nestor,” “Hades,” and “Nausicaa” like tributaries leaking into the main flow and apexing in Molly’s soliloquy in the “Penelope” chapter--seems to deafen and overshadow unlikely tears of repentance. In Vladimir Nabokov’s ambiguously ironic, provocatively elusive opinion, “James Joyce’s mistake in those otherwise marvelous mental soliloquies of his consists in that he gives too much verbal body to thoughts (Strong Opinions 30). Perhaps. Or, rather, as Stephen ruminates, “Nes. Yo” (Ulysses 430). One would like to know.

The flow released by lifting the valve from the jet pouring out of the faucet reveals all the water-words meandering throughout the novel as a maplike delta comfortably protected by the sea hybridizing all the streams, yet somehow preserving their distinctiveness. Fluid, yet distinguishable. Fluctuating, yet steady. Elusive, yet strangely fathomable. Such is the mighty flow anchoring the storyline in this stunning novel of Joyce’s. Like language, those narratives reiterate the concept of power and what it means to be constitutive of it.

As if unified by the “Aeolus” chapter, the episodes immersed in the imagery of water offer a symbolic in the key of versatile fluidity. As if an overarching, hub trope were that of “gaseous vertebrate” (Ulysses 162) that spans the trajectory of the whole vastness of the story, persisting in providing the much needed connective, sustaining the consistency of its yarns, subtlety of its threads. Like the omnipresent imagery safeguarding the coherence of that giant narrative by the very virtue of its own mutability, the metaphor, while creating a sense of an impalpable presence is also invoking the awareness of the communication between quirky spatiality and capricious chronology. The perseverance of that presence through time epitomizes the idea of the historicizable ahistorical: undoubtedly situated within a particular moment, and yet, reflecting other timeframes, other spatio-temporalities.

Like the characterization, defying cronos’s empire, and yet not detaching itself from the bitter-sweet romance with history: “probably that was it to somebody who thinks she has a softy in him because all men get a bit like that at his age especially getting on to forty he is now” (Ulysses 609). Like the young surgeon in the episode “Oxen of the Sun” challenging the perception of age. Like the symbolic of  “childman,” its inverted version of “manchild” (Ulysses 606), and the communication between them. What is the age of that historicizable ahistorical character? One would like to know.

Just as there is something about the characterization owing its eccentricity to the communication channel saturated with static, so is it to a high degree suggestive of resilience that allows the fluidity to deliver a solid, yet not rigid, message. Thus severed by the battle between corrosive noise and the signal persisting those temporary threats of distortion, it is a transient communicational tunnel that acquires characteristics of the communication channel as a momentary corruption of the communication content is dissolving, and the flow is being re-established. Those are the loops reverberating with the themes of labyrinthine seductiveness of entrapment by potion, distraction by unlikely tones, and bewilderment by facelessness, as portrayed in the episodes such as “Sirens,” “Cyclops,” and/or “Circe.”

Molly, in possession of the most prominent vocal of all the characters in the novel, articulates profound comments cacophonous in tone, polyphonous in thematic. Ranging from sometimes charmingly lascivious, at times nearly vulgarly blatant explorations of the realm of the carnal, her internally verbalized thought addresses the issue of the body finding questionable satisfaction in copious fornication not infrequently associated with clerical context. At the same time, evoking bodily sensations semidetached from inner dynamic, her speech-flow reinstates random encounters and elusiveness, unreliability, and suspicion pertinent to their irredeemably aloof nature, to their aura echoing irrecoverable alienation, incorrigible insularity.

Partly, her brooding thoughts reflect a perception of another being as afflicted, fragmented, disjoined. Partly, they voice an agonizing sense of longing. Those aspects of her soliloquy portray the experience of the other as the utter unknown, just as the whole world appears to be observed from that angle: “he says your soul you have no soul inside only grey matter because he doesn’t know what it is to have one” (Ulysses 611).  Here, Joyce sketches the crux--the key knot--of the narrative presenting the world populated by disconnectedness, void, and vapidness. Simultaneously, he offers a hint for disentangling those static drenched nodes within the web constitutive of and constituted by the communication between and among fellow humans.

Where frustration by hindered communication mirrors dissatisfaction with human interaction, simplicity, instead of being a manifestation of purity, is rather sought as a haven for comprehension starved minds. Likewise, unfathomable information is understood to be a result of the perplexities imposed by the style and demanding level of complexity of the communication input:“he never can explain a thing simply the way a body can understand” (Ulysses 620). Where compromises are uneasy choices brining a sense of insipid indifference, human relationships merely reflect a worryingly uninspiring, unfulfilling experience of oneself:“hed never find another woman like me to put up with him the way I do” (Ulysses 613). Friction inducing mutuality, rather than soothing reciprocity, is indicative of the prevalent offcolor lenses that render the perception of the world painfully alien:“and he knows that too at the bottom of his heart” (Ulysses 613).

And yet, there is noise within noise. Within that disheartening confession, “there is a flower that bloometh” (Ulysses 625), as Joyce puts it so well. Within those supposedly comforting, while, in fact, saddening crumbs of disillusionment, a bud of genuine solace is hidden. Waiting to be recuperated and its alleviating power resumed, waiting for its vibrancy to resurface --recovered. He knows it. Just as she does: “theres nothing like a kiss long and hot down to your soul almost paralyses you” (Ulysses 610). The passion engrained in the power of that knowledge ensures discerning and sustaining distinctions such as the one between the flower in question and other types of flora. It safeguards from a threat of “ignoramus that doesn’t know poetry from a cabbage” (Ulysses 638). The oneiric of poetry undoing nightmares of history. Such is the mighty flow of the anchorage, the quirky disenchantment with that what eludes even the elusiveness of language.

Suspicious to the Core (five / 2)

NOise : Hack the Abstraction!

“For it is not the work of heat to make cold, but the opposite? / Yes. / And it is not the work of what is dry to make things wet, but the opposite. / Certainly.” Plato, The Republic

Invoking the re-emergence of the shakespearean ghost in the trope casting light on the recurring imagery of the constellation of Cassiopeia (Ulysses 575) renders the name of the Bard perceivable at the level of characterization. Although suggestive of a potential symbolic act of “disestablishment,” the metaphoric charge of this narrative maneuvering, in fact, offers a far more complex and nourishing signification. It is provocative, to say the very least. And yet, it invites thinking reverence through the nobility of rebellion. By so doing, it disentangles one of the many seeming knots within its very tissue. Not only does it reconfigure the meaning of the mythical names of Scylla and Charybdis in the context of the novel, but inspires disambiguation of the entrenched perception of uneasy “choices.” Does avoiding one perplexity necessarily imply accepting another? One would highly doubt it.

That ghostly presence of the shakepearean flow brings into the narrative the names of the sons of the novel: Stephen Dedalus and Rudolph Bloom (Ulysses 575). It is the very presence of those sons that is evocative of the looming shadows of their fathers: Simon Dedalus and Leopold Bloom. And it is precisely the elusive characters of each one of them that is suggestive of their infinitely interlaced aspects: crossing, merging, fusing, colliding, separating…distancing…and yet, remaining hybridized in the immortalized image of the birth of the Bard in the interstellar spaces overlooking the mighty water. Like the whisper from the fountain (Ulysses 389). Like hamlet, the sonfather. Like the mutual recognition between the son and the father--womanly man--through the communication channel free of foggy noise, relieved of amalgamation obfuscating the flow – invigorated and cleansed by the power of crystalline signal, by virtue of noise.

Shakespearean presence bears some semblance to the wandering companionship depicted in the imagery of the moon and the parallels Joyce draws between it and the symbolic of woman. Hardly could a description of the dynamic of those convergences and juxtapositions be imagined in a more powerful poetic key than the intersection highly suggestive of the restorative potential of the vacillations between diverse aspects of ambivalence and ambiguity epitomized in antithetical, yet not antagonistic -- colliding, but also resonating -- affliction and elevation,  turbulence and vibrancy, adversary and solace, as presented in Ulysses:

Her antiquity in preceding and surviving successive tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant implacable resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible. (576)

When Bloom in the “Ithaca” episode turns on the faucet in the kitchen of his house, he lifts a valve and the cornucopia of imagery leaks through that tubular device (Ulysses 549). The outpour symbolizing the versatility, quirkiness, elusiveness, and gentleness of water brings to awareness the perplexity of earthly affairs in the shadow of moonlight. The valve opens up the flow perceivable by many, available to all, owned by noone. It sheds light to the particularly salient trope of “satellitic dependence” reflecting the power of meekness embodied in the tricky wording. Just as the silvery companion is dependent on the planet it shadows, so is its impact and power inevitably experienced and mirrored in the pulsation of the orbit it safeguards. Just as the satellitic character defines it, so is the planet characterized as being the host of its satellite. Just as one is characterized by its accompanying attributes, so is the other recognized in the key of being accompanied. How does this dynamic reshift the dependency narrative?

This constancy by virtue of resilience, power by virtue of weakness, stability within fragility is what is integral to the flow connecting Stephen and Bloom in the midst of those unfathomable tribulations, indecisiveness, and bewilderment. There is the flow anchoring those stormy surfaces, anchoring those wandering “Jews,” those wandering rocks. The same anchor that cleanses poor Lear’s agitated heart torn by torrential gushes of guilt. His “faucet” unleashes the purifying shower of tears (1.4.251-264). While he is not entirely willing to repent, his tears speak that what he cannot. Vladimir Nabokov:”We think not in words, but in shadows of words” (Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions 30).[1] As they flow, they offer a possibility to recuperate his inner turmoil and cleanse his curse plagued mouth with the appeasing faculty of the friendly presence reconstituting the vitalizing bonding between the parent and the offspring.

Lear learns. So can everyone else. By virtue of humbleness.

---

[1] Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions.  1973. New York: Vintage International, 1990.

Suspicious to the Core ( five / 1)

The Language-Power Nexus : disenchantment with omnipotence

“Freedom in a positive sense is possible only among equals, and equality itself is by no means a  universally valid principle, but, again, applicable only within limitations and even within spatial limits.” – Hannah Arendt, On Revolution

Historicizable Ahistorical “Scylla & Charybdis”

“Was it not agreed that the rulers, in telling their subjects what to do, sometimes make a mistake, and miss their own advantage, but whatever the rulers enjoin upon them it is just for their subjects to do?” Plato, The Republic

Eden--torpid and deadly sanitized--is being saturated with a sulfur virus. Rotten odor spreads. Miraculously, its molecules undergo a transformation resulting in consolidation of gaseous masses into crystalline formations. Those, under the impalpable touch of an invisible wand, are being transformed into constituent ingredients of--an apple! The myth has it that the embodiment of rebellion to mark the beginning of eons of attempts to replicate the original revolt was demonstrated in breaching the ban on eating from an epistemological source--the tree of knowledge, the fruit of power. To imagine obedience as ignorance would imply a logical impossibility, i.e., to perceive the counterdemonic as darkness. How, then, is one to reconcile those perplexing paradoxes and figure out the puzzle of the early days of  Genesis, as Judeo-Christian narrative presents it? Is the key to the conundrum in the missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle? Are they missing because they are lost? May this quizzical nature of knowledge in the crevices of the tale be part of John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost (1667)? One would like to know.

we are not robozombies!

            Turmoil at Pandemonium, generated through an accumulation of ill-conceived energies, is suggested through the saturation of the sinister atmosphere with evil forces epitomized in names such as Mammon, Chaos, and Babel. The power of the presence of those names is proportional to the increase in militant aspirations in their midst. They are throne thirsty. They are heights hungry. They might know what they do in a similar way Gonerill in William Shakespeare’s King Lear (1606) does, or, so her sister, Regan, claims (4.2.228). If so, do they know indeed? One would like to know.

we are not robozombies!

            Uneasiness exuding from unlikely cohorts soaks each and every foot of Milton’s profoundly insightful and incredibly accurate depiction of inner tension between fluctuations and equilibrium. The intensity of the dynamic is conjured up through the combination of lyricism woven in the epic and the moral dilemma underscoring the verbal tapestry. The narration is steadfastly focused on the quirky antagonism and ethical collisions. It can easily echo the innerness of a Parliamentarian confronting Royalist oppression. It may reflect friction caused by antithesis, ambivalence, and duplicity challenging the heart and the mind of a rebel not averse to orderliness, and yet, highly critical of illogicalities under the disguise of lawfulness.

Milton’s poem, indeed, exceeds the boundaries of the epoch that saw a Stuart ruler -- Charles I -- on the English throne dethroned, a monarchy overthrown, and the civil war ravaging the country. It resonates with the eras preceding  it, when death of the last Tudor monarch --Elizabeth I -- demarcated the turning point in the constellations of dynasties and brought to England a neighboring, yet nevertheless, foreign royalty, thereby inflicting on the subjects a considerable amount of bewilderment, insecurity, and discomfort. It can also be perceived from the modern day  perspective – from Ireland’s struggle for independence to contemporary cultural realities where regal figures are almost reducible to the notion of celebrities within an eerie spectacle of  mindlessly mechanized, indiscriminately legalistic and legalized, overwhelmingly formalistic and formulaic, overregulated anomie.

Those aporias miltonian parliamentarian is confronted with are in the antecedent works manifested in the imagery of enraged nature, as Shakespeare colors the world of  Lear’s reasoning and power obscured by a looming dark cloud of greed, unscrupulousness, moral vacuity, and filial bestiality. So are they depicted in sometimes hardly understandable mismatch within the respective characters of Bloom, a.k.a., “childe Leopold” (Ulysses 317) and Stephen with regard to maturity and stability. Fatherly son…”womanly man” (Ulysses 403)…age defying young surgeon passionately dedicated to his calling (Ulysses 332)…words of encouragement with which Edgar presents his blind father Gloucester:” Think that the clearest gods, who make them honors / Of men’s impossibilities, have preserved thee” (King Lear 4.5.73-74)…and the edifying power of Cordelia’s affection: Lear learns patience, which he knows and claims to need (2.4.264), as if reflecting Edgar’s words of consolation to his  tormented father:”Bear free and patient thoughts” (4.5.80)…”The wise father knows his own child” (Ulysses 337).

Uncritical, stereotypical, and—above all—reductionist fantasy of the fallen angel presumes a heavenly demand for refraining from knowledge. To say that such blockage of the imagination makes a crude error by premising the Genesis myth on the idea of humans as an ignorant bunch is superfluous. It is also epistemologically flawed. There is no such demand: human capacity to know is by default limited; so is human power. That, however, makes human beings neither bereft of vitality nor deprived of knowledge. It certainly does not threaten freedom. Quite the opposite. By virtue of limitation, by virtue of restraint.

Does this justify oppression by analogously claiming hierarchy based orderliness, thereby perpetuating social  relations thriving on dominance, injustice, and inequities? Certainly not. Should rebellion against tyranny of rule void of authority be articulated in the vocabulary different from that which by being so fraudulent poses a threat to the perception and critique of hypocrisy? One would find it reasonable to believe so.

Suspicious to the Core (4 / three)

how old is the american dream?

Noone can remember when the american dream was conceived, when it started. Hardly can anyone know. That happens to be yet another manifestation of the epistemological quandary. A possible sense of frustration--annoyment--may be ascribed to what Arendt classifies as the western civilization predicament:

The curious fact that the men of the revolutions were prompted into their desperate search for an absolute the very moment they had been forced to act might well be, at least partly, influenced by the age-old thought-customs of Western men, according to which each completely new beginning needs an absolute from which it springs and by which it is ‘explained’. (On Revolution 198)

This insight into the perception of an absolute as a cultural construct is eerily elusive in its potentially ambiguous referencing of pronouns and, hence, possibly misleading understanding of the relationship between the subject, the object, and the predicate of the sentence. Needless to say, such quirky syntax reflects part of the uncertainty characterizing multifarious linguistic socioscape of a babylonian culture of today.

That both the implied statement about cultural cacophony and the overtly raised question about the need and want to know where the beginnings are and what the source is sound too familiar to the ear of a denizen of contemporary culture is self-evident. We are living in a culture that does not tolerate unconquered (or, unconquerable) epistemological zones. If it accepts their existence, it does so only to transform--hack--them into maneuvering space for oppressive socio-political control. Contemporary cultural realities are averse to silence. Silence is being under a constant threat of commoditization--of becoming a brand selling disguised muteness. We don’t buy it.

Contemporary cultural realities tend to impose a model of thinking based on infinitely dumbing urge to explicate, explain, instruct, formalize, banalize. It is a culture of vagaries that absurdly combines inclinations toward rigidity and illogicalities, a culture that, while detailing, does not celebrate clarity. If it seemingly refrains from the mode of perception crudely dulling the edge of critical thinking, it does so not to provide an individual with space for either exploration or contentment with the experience of the limit in diverse spheres that characterize the human, but to advance the possibility to distract, bewilder, and pollute--hack. We don’t buy it.

The bitter-sweet truth about blindness pertinent to such mindlessly orgiastic affinity for dominance and control is that manipulation, falsified power, and bewilderment are but manifestations of futile attempts at omnipotence--instances of (self)dissolving noise. This, among other things, concerns a category mistake Arendt points out in relation to the development of the French Revolution, and can be contextualized within contemporary situations, as well. Namely, she rightly indicates the inversion of the relationship between the social and the political. She demonstrates the meaning of the dislocation of the role of oppression as a consequence, not a cause, of poverty and other social ills that galvanized the revolutionary impetus in the France of 1789. The idea that oppression and violence ensue from economic inequities--not vice versa--determined the course of the French Revolution. No less was it instrumental in framing cultural climate to be further integrated into the socioscape during the centuries to follow.

Nowadays, we are no strangers to the fruits of such masterminding. No wonder revolutions are associated with severe reductionism in understanding of the public and the private. More precisely, both the French Revolution and the American Revolution practically abandoned the idea about citizens’ participation in the public affairs as the end of the revolution. Instead, it was pursuit of prosperity that was accepted as a major revolutionary demand. Citizens became merely individuals (interestingly, void of individuality) -- no masks, no hypocrisy, no role play -- whereas politicians assumed the properties of professionals, experts, businessmen focused on self-interest and wealth, drunk on a delusional sensation of power. Hannah Arendt:

The trouble lies in the lack of public spaces to which people at large would have entrance and from which an élite could be selected, or rather, where it could select itself. The trouble, in other words, is that politics has become a profession and a career, and that the ‘élite’ therefore is being chosen according to standards and criteria which are themselves profoundly unpolitical. (On Revolution 269-270)

By extension, this demarcates a vehement offense to the concept of freedom. Hannah Arendt: “Freedom and power have parted company, and the fateful equating of power with violence, of the political with government, and of government with a necessary evil has begun” (On Revolution 128).

Such is Arendt’s portrayal of history and geography out of joints, and “under the pressure of wealth” (On Revolution 129). The world featuring “a society intent upon affluence and consumption” (On Revolution 129) is looking for the mirror image on the faces of its dwellers – the image that subverts the presumption that since “the end of revolution and the introduction of constitutional government spelled the end of public freedom” (On Revolution 125), it does not follow that pursuing to end the revolution should be desirable. Arendt is being provocative. She, too, is a modern reader. Her text provides one with the opportunity to learn. To learn to…well, read. Do we trust each and every syntagm constitutive of the questions asked and statements made in this book characterized by vibrant thought and abounding in invigorating energies? Certainly not.

For that reason, one should time and again revisit and rediscover the wonders of questions and statements and ask/state every time, while finetuning the linguistic content to the sound of the moment. At this point, one is prone to ask how relevant the genuine version of the American Dream is, how significant the core of revolution, when the dwellers of the modern world bear witness to a global exodus. Above all, how almost universal the symbolic of the wandering Jew is (or, wandering rocks, for that matter), hybridized in the conversation between Stephen and Bloom in James Joyce’s Ulysses. One would like to know.

Suspicious to the Core (4 / 2)

Selfless, Yet Re-Individualized

In “Ithaca,” questions saturate the paths Stephen and Bloom walk. Answers come in shapes and forms more often than not meandering around the central issues the questions raise. Many of them can hardly be perceived as proper responses to the questions posed. Perhaps, it can be claimed that the majority of the utterances only loosely reference the themes delineated in the questions. At least not in the way that would provide fully fledged information about the inquiry presented.

To what extent is such a communicational pattern reminiscent of the contemporary predicament that confronts one with information overload and the demand to find ways of managing such a situation? To what degree is verbal outpour and elusive trajectories of the intersection between the question and the answer informative of the sentiment of a dweller of the modern world highly sensitized to the everyday incorporated in the scarily detailed language of instructions for anything ranging from the use of appliances, to unpacking an object bought either online (for which one undergoes an ordeal of instructions, as well) or in an actual store (to which detailed directions are provided depending on the choice of transportation, if any), to recognizing emotions, or some such stuff? How much of it is part of the situation the modern world introduces to one on a daily basis challenging our capacity to resist being given an explanation, description, directions, instructions for each situation, every move, every single activity, or state?

Can a contemporary reader relate to the plethora of verbal input “Ithaca” presents? Can one refrain from a potential feeling of frustrated desire having not been provided with the information typically expected in response to certain questions? Can we accept the limits pivotal to being human? Can we, nevertheless, sustain the awareness of the cognitive potential and epistemological possibilities, despite restrictions? Can one, paradoxically, find the strangest of consolations in the fact that amid the ungraspable ocean of words, unbelievable orgies of information, emerge tiny pieces, miniscule messages distinct in tone, resonating with the aerials of the interlocutor? Can one rejoice in the reverberation of particular content, even though the reason why their frequencies are of the akin valences and how their distinctiveness can be detected can scarcely be known?

The tension sounds probably too familiar to the ear accustomed to noise this planet abounds in. Should one assume that the narrative world Joyce creates foreshadows some of the aspects of living in the same world almost a century after the novel was published? Certainly not. That’s one of the lessons this invaluable book teaches. Despite the temptations or whatever aims to assume such a role. Nowadays, one needs to be even more modern than the reader from the early twentieth century in order to be able to resist attempting to read Joyce’s miraculous text in the key of conventional prose.

The reader needs to sharpen one’s feelers, to invigorate the edginess, and enhance the critical apparatus in order to mobilize the capacity to sift, filter, select, and crystallize those significant bits in the midst of cultural amalgamation. Just as one needs to persevere in discerning and sustaining the distinction between individualism and individuality, between uniformity and unity. One needs to time and again reconstitute the energies to finetune the remapping potential and undo frankenstinian discourse, reconfigure power relations narratives, revitalize subtonic hi-fi solidarity, and reanimate a vibrant sense of integrity. In a word, the reader needs to be the dj navigating through the narrative realm with the combination of oscillating, yet unshakable, firmly resilient, attitude: the right to the remix. To experience reading-writing as an embodiment of refacement: rebirth of the human face out of cultural amalgamation, reintegration of  the community of selfless, yet re-individualized, fellow humans united in enduring hindrances to the patient, persistent creation of a free culture based on trust and love.

Evoking Arendt’s thought about erroneous pathways the French Revolution and the American Revolution took, in this noisy, mechanized and mechanistic world, the world that is acquiring properties of an omniscient paw(n)shop--the world of overregulated anomie--one is reminded of the relevance of the dialectic of distinctiveness and generalities, the individual and the communal, the public and the private. In that context, some of the notions and ideas principal to the debate Arendt delineates as follows:

The grammar of action: that action is the only human faculty that demands the plurality of men; and the syntax of power: that power is the only human attribute which applies solely to the worldly in-between space by which men are mutually related, combine in the act of foundation by virtue of the making and keeping of promises, which, in the realm of politics, may well be the highest human faculty. (On Revolution 167)

Such a human faculty knows neither oppressive nor coercive means of weaving social relations. Because it does not need them. It is free from an urge to persuade the electorate in its righteousness. Hence, it needs no “intrigue, falsehood, and machination” (On Revolution 95) to contrive its authority. It is not violent. Because it can communicate. It does not thrive on subjugation and/or dominance. Because it is immune to a sense of society understood in terms of threat, danger, rivalry. It does not atomize the unity of fellow humans in order to aggrandize its significance building it on afflicted powers of individuals. It does not instigate the allure of self-centeredness as a substitute for individuality. It does not need to inflict fear, uncertainty, and/or a feeling of an ongoing struggle where coexistence, sharing, and respect should be. It is anchored in the idea that homo homini homo est, regardless of numberless instances of a deviation of that fact.

It is precisely because of that human faculty that one perseveres in undoing ill-conceived misconceptions and mismanaged crossbreeds. Precisely for that reason, one sustains the awareness of the unlikely fusion of the economic and the ethical and their links with political fabric. By extension, it is an issue of burning importance to recuperate intrusion of “economic morality” in the sphere of religious institutions and their connection with politics: to remap power relations narratives. The fact that a major portion of those “narratives” resists verbalization and that the intricacies of the ineffable limit the capacities of linguistics and logic by no means diminishes the significance of rationality, reason, and critical thinking. Nor does it downplay the relevance in the key of reverence. It certainly has no impact on the right to the remix. Quite the opposite. Like revolution.

The remix relies on quirky intersections of the time axes. It celebrates the historicizable ahistorical. It thrives on the capricious dialogue between experimentation and tradition, between change and preservation. Neither lionizing the past--since no historical epoch is worthy of perpetuating social relations based on inequality, inequity, and inhumaneness--nor idealizing a somnambulist future, the remix is based on hic & nunc / anticarpediem poetics focusing on the here and now, yet refraining from the prevalent propensity in contemporary culture to instantaneous  gratifications, sensationalism, and sentimentalism. It objects to radical abandonment of the past vocabularies. Rather, it proposes communication with tradition rendering it remixable, just as contemporary cultural realities are. It invests in redeeming the past, reimagining the future, and resurrecting the present.

The remix is attuned to the sound of the epoch. So does it listen to the vibrations from traditional narratives. It is, therefore, sensitized to the conundrum presented in Arendt’s book and reads it with the awareness of the revolutionary role of James Joyce’s Ulysses. It rejoices in playfulness of wondering how to say it clearly that to say it is nothing new. That’s why, nowadays, the reader needs to be more modern than readers from the turn of the twentieth century. We bear witness to a rapidly changing face of the everyday. The velocity conquering each segment of the lives of the dwellers of contemporary world reaches the point of self-dissolvement, since it creates a sense of continual change that challenges typical notion of speed. Like (self)dissolving noise.

The sense of the potential of change and its being compromised by its own radical version Arendt accounts for quite aptly:

In other words, the political spirit of modernity was born when men were no longer satisfied that empires would rise and fall in sempiternal change; it is as though men wished to establish a world which could be trusted to last forever, precisely because they knew how novel everything was that their age attempted to do. (On Revolution 216)

This longing for continuity in some instances can divert into a perverted form that tracks the debate back to the question of omnipotence and a category mistake. Namely, having realized that just because things can change, societies can be reconfigured, and political elites replaced, one also understands that it does not follow that the world should be transformed into an epitome of instability. Hence, balancing between the experience of the instant and the succession of such instances, one cannot but acknowledge the comfort of being part of the flow of history and the moments that make it. In the mind of a citizen deprived of (or free from) the burden of political responsibilities, it may inspire reflections of philosophical, artistic, or some such kind. And yet, it may resemble idiosyncrasies the political realm features. Specifically, the sense of continuity oftentimes transmutates into the ideas of eternity and immortality. Given the previously mentioned discursive orgies pertinent to the modern world, one cannot help but note that such perversions of concept exude a very dangerous whiff of demigodliness and, by extension, entail a delusional sense of omnipotence and misconception of worldly and otherworldly categories. Terry Eagleton:”Immortality and immorality are closely allied” (After Theory 211).

The dynamic reflects the need to sustain sensitivity to the inexplicable and, to a high degree, unfathomable dialectic of change and preservation manifested in genuine authority and characterizing the very core of revolution. The ungraspable dialogue between the seemingly confrontational--antithetical, yet not antagonistic--notions is closely linked with the equally puzzling relationship between necessity and freedom. Arendt points out the nexus as the crux of the question of revolution situating it within the polemic about the American Revolution:

Less spectacular perhaps, but certainly no less real, are the consequences of the American counterpart to the world’s ignorance, her own failure to remember that a revolution gave birth to the United States and that the republic was brought into existence by no ‘historical necessity’ and no organic development, but by a deliberate act: the foundation of freedom. (On Revolution 208)

The paradox is that the very sovereignty of freedom, outplaying necessity, is suggestive of its immunity and its uncontestable character. The awkwardness of verbal articulation and logical reasoning in the narrowest sense, coupled with the weirdness of temporality and newness, may instate a deceitful impression of unlikely relationship between necessity and freedom. That’s perhaps why revolution can only be understood, if only in a restricted sense, through the prism of paradox.

It inspires thoughts about the wonder of birth as a radical novelty, yet strangely invoking a sense of continuity, as suggested in Joyce’s Ulysses:”regions and cycles of the generations that have lived” (338). Just as revolution incorporates logically hardly commensurable concepts of change and preservation. All this is tremendously invigorating and is a reminder that thinking worldly matters requires insistence on the limits of the human. Simultaneously, the problematic can be meditated upon in terms of eternity, ubiquity, and omnipotence--paradoxically, determinants of the limits of the human and the source of power.